


The Enemy of My Enemy Turned Out to be a Trickster God

by Like_a_Hurricane



Series: Pernicious Prompting [23]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Loki has commitment issues, M/M, Mixed Signals, Rogue vs Loki interpersonal chessgames, Tony can tell but damn he wants a piece of that, and X-men: Evolution-inspired, and so does Loki whether he is aware or no, and to an extent for Loki, because every single one them needs all the therapy they can get, borrowed more from 616 while ignoring most movie-verse canon, neither 616 nor movie-verse X-men, once they like you, so many of them, the X-men are like a support group you can never actually escape, well for Thanos it went wrong, what if Thanos had just put Loki under control the way Loki did Clint but it went all wrong
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:43:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1913172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Like_a_Hurricane/pseuds/Like_a_Hurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a couple of millennia in Thor’s shadow, generally vilified and, in the cases of typecasting in all of mankind’s myths (especially after Christianity showed up) as a villain, Loki tended to keep all but those closest to his heart generally held at arm’s length. </p><p>	He is determined to maintain this policy when he lands on Earth in the middle of an alien invasion, after his great long fall off of the Bïfrost, and finds that humans are more than happy to ally with him, against the end of their own world. One is sorceress enough to know to get an oath from him, though, and he was in no position to defy, weakened drastically by his fall as he was. He gave it; only, however, to those twins, to the X-men's eventual dismay.</p><p>	Cue the arrival of former-arms-dealer Tony Stark and his Avengers, and their forming an alliance with the X-men. A group of heavily armed and powerful lunatics, led by a self-made technomage whose smiles are full of equally tantalizing degrees of threat and promise, and an appreciation of Loki’s lethality as well as his physique.</p><p>Explosions. Only Explosions, Loki is convinced, can follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> MAJOR EDITS MADE!
> 
> Okay, so when I first wrote this story, to say it was rushed would be a hellacious understatement. It was a prompt-fic that fed into an older idea I’d had bouncing around in the back of my head for a long time before it, but my haste to crank it out in time to move on to the next prompt caused it to have a lot of flaws and to be a bit too hasty.
> 
> This was pointed out to me in a few AO3 comments, and I knew very well that the whole thing needed… a lot more to it. There was just a lot I’d been too focused on a deadline to properly dedicate time and dialogue-refinement to.
> 
> Finally, I'm just the right shade of burnt-out, apparently, to fix this thing. I destroyed no old scenes and dialogues have been altered structurally, but not insofar as content. 16,700 words of new scenes added and resulting from those dialogue-edits. So I had to break the original Chapter 1 into smaller pieces, because altogether in a single chapter, plus those edits, made the whole thing absurdly long.
> 
> So Hello again, welcome back, I've redecorated and hope you like it.

When Loki fell into the rift in space and time caused by the destruction of the Bïfrost, his descent was an endless drop through nightmarish horrors, as he slipped and tumbled around and through cracks between the universe and the void beyond, and occasionally into other universes altogether.

It had been a struggle to make his way back to his native patch of home universe and the embrace of Yggdrasil, via the tesseract. The journey by which he had arranged for others to bring him that opportunity to reach his true home ever again, had been far, far worse, though.

 

He had been captured by monsters inclined to use his powers of travel. Such spells and tricks consisted of those most slippery powers unique to Loki and thus his most valuable and personally cherished secrets: all the clever ways that he could go where no others could.

 

Loki’s memories of that time were hazy and skittish things, interrupted by small flickers of acutely painful clarity: a few names, and some horrifying images, as well as other agonies and indignities that haunted his dreams, and occasionally even his waking hours too: itching at his brain in ways that made his hands shake or made rooms suddenly seem to lack sufficient air.

 

The journey back particularly, all too soon after his deliberate fall from Asgard, had taxed him too hard, bringing too many of the others with him. They had re-caged him instantly, and began the invasion with all haste.

 

What he remembered most clearly was escaping the Chitauri fleet and breaking free of the tesseract’s control with an effort of will greater than anyone, least of all himself, had known until then that Loki had still been capable of. It had burned through parts of his mind and soul: searing brands more agonizing to self-inflict than anything else he had ever felt before in his long life.

 

Despite the cost, he had broken free, with his magic not just substantially drained but also severely damaged, along with some of his most recent memories broken and distorted: evidence that had he not broken free of the tesseract when he did, he would have lost far more of his mind, and possibly even some of his history and identity both. The thought chilled him worse than the snow he had landed in; although it was the latter that brought forth his Jötunn war-colors, to add insult to his metaphysical and physical injuries.

 

The damages to his physical body weren’t quite as bad as what had hit his brain, his magic, and possibly a bit of his soul. In fact, the familiar feelings of more corporeal agony––from cracked ribs, stab wounds and burns up both arms, to bruises all over everything else and a concussion––were almost a comfort, in comparison. They were pains that he could predict the endings of, when he could finally have relief, and he hadn’t had the luxury of that in far too long.

 

Especially when he could finally focus upon it, instead of the still-crackling, hissing damages to his magic that burned still brighter in his more metaphysical awareness for that first hour, after his post-escape violent crash-landing. He had taken the risk of channelling too much power, and it had burned him.

 

Served him right, again, for caring so damned much about coming back. He only brought the entire Chitauri fleet from the opposite end of the galaxy back to the heart of all of Yggdrasil: for the Earth, Midgard, was the most vulnerable realm in all the nine and thus the one most easily taken over, then afterwards used as a base from which to connect to, and then conquer, all of the others, too.

 

_They should not have been able to follow me, nor forcibly control my magics to exploit them so, to bring their whole army along. How did they..._

 

Trying to remember brought him only another flicker of blazing blue agony.

 

He tried not to panic and wonder just how much else he had lost, of mind and even memory. So he focused instead on trying to shift his shoulders into a position kinder to his ribs. He managed to shift his weight onto his left forearm, and use it to lever himself up until he could roll onto his back with a small, slightly pathetic groan.

 

 _I’m back._ He thought, for the first time, and it finally, finally sunk in for a blissful moment, that he could feel the familiar connection to Yggdrasil, and the forces that flow through all the nine realms.

 

Even this small, mortal-riddled world was tuned into that symphony, and it crept up through the ground to hit first his shoulders, and then down through the rest of his body and soothing some of the metaphysical burn as his magic, finally free, reached out to meet that symphony and rejoin it again at last.

 

For several minutes, his eyes stayed closed.

 

His own tears felt unnaturally warm running down the sides of his face and almost drifted up and back into his ears, due to the angle. They froze before they got halfway there.

 

~~

 

It became known on Earth, very soon after the arrival of the Chitauri, that Thanos desired the powers of the gods and far more: powers that even gods would not dare wield, especially the likes of which Odin kept in Asgard’s weapon’s vault. And he would stop at nothing to “convert” their world into a base of operations for that purpose. A lot of necessary demolition––so he had announded to all of humanity across every possible form of communication device on the planet, in a language somehow understood by all who heard it––would, of course, be necessary.

 

Thanos had not counted on the likes of the maddest lunatics humanity had to offer actually turning out to have sufficient powers to combat his Chitauri, with such success as to entirely halt their progress and thoroughly hinder his plans in a few major city-centers around the globe. He also had not counted on the broken godling Loki––forced as he was into service like so many others considered too strong-willed for Thanos to trust without psychically instilled servility keeping them obedient––being capable of sufficient will and magic to break free of the mad Titan’s control, not very long after recovering from the feat (boosted by Thanos’ own powers and those of a few other Converted allies) of welcoming the whole Chitauri fleet to Earth: mere days, thanks to the Other’s unique brands of hospitality, however agonizing they had actually been for the god to endure.

 

No one had been counting on Loki’s ability to will the tesseract to unmake itself violently the next time he was led past it a bit too closely, taking the Other with it, and nearly Loki himself too, had he been any closer to them both. It had taken Thanos’ minions and lieutenants alike over a week to discover even the smallest sliver of evidence that the god of lies _might_ have survived that blast, in fact.

 

When Loki had escaped his captors by carving a too-hasty teleportation spell around his feet with blades of ice, too disoriented to apply the intricate safe-guards that he would usually employ into the spell, the godling had used more magic than he actually had left to give, and it was that resulting energy debt alone, in the midst of a teleport with no concrete destination (just _away away_ ** _away_** ) which nearly ended the trickster’s life.

 

Nearly… but not quite.

 

Gamora knew all of this. She also knew an opportunity when she saw one, and quietly framed one of her “siblings” for sabotaging the first few hunts and search-parties sent after the God of chaos and lies, who had all discerned (incorrectly, and conveniently) that Loki could not possibly have survived or escaped.

 

He had promised her a favor, if she would turn a blind eye or two, for his sake, when it counted. She had questioned his ability to achieve any such opportunity, and he had admitted more than a little doubt himself, but told her that he liked to keep his options open.

 

Finding information about the populace of Yggdrasil, loony as they all were, even in the lonely backwaters like Terra, hadn’t been difficult. She knew the weight of a promise from the likes of a Jötunn like Loki, even trickster as he was.

 

He had been desperate, but not too desperate to hope for one hell of a long-shot, or at least pretend to, in order to converse with her: Gamora being one of the only beings in the prison who ever looked him in the eye and expected more of him than to be a laboratory rat for the Other, or mindlessly obedient to Thanos’ will.

 

So he owed her a favor. And one day soon she might just collect.

 

~~

 

Loki had not managed to progress any further toward uprightness––he had, in fact, been drifting in and out of consciousness rather dangerously for about fifteen minutes, since he had managed to repair only his concussion so far––when he heard footsteps approaching him.

 

They were bipedal, but far, far too fast to be mundanely mortal. He cringed at the thought of being discovered, and knew his odds weren’t good, down on Earth these days, if those feet belonged to anything more dangerous than a mortal, and that sound… stopped at a safe, cautious distance just out of arm’s reach, and advanced no further.

 

Loki had landed somewhere cold and two very-human-sounding people were asking him if he was one of the invaders. The god’s eyelids fluttered open enough for him to squint up at them. There seemed to be too much light in the world for how tender his eyes felt upon exposure to it, but he managed through to haze to discern that they were indeed human–– _or mostly human, possibly altered?_ ––and siblings, one with long auburn hair only loosely pulled back, the other with short, sleek silver hair.

 

Both of them had the same dark, wary stares, but the sister of the pair wore a more clinincal and sincerely concerned demeanor than her brother, who stood behind her like his very existence there alone counted as both threat and promise. “You’re not from around here, but you don’t exactly look like you’re in any shape to perpetuate an invasion, particularly around here. There’s no good rabble-rousing around here.”

 

“Trust me, I’ve tried,” Pietro deadpanned. He didn’t move when his sister lightly elbowed him with a stern look, but when she looked away again he did glare down at his feet instead of back at the trickster, at least for a moment before survival instincts overrode his sister’s lifelong training and habitual alertness brought his attention right back to the potential threat.

 

Thankfully, one of the gifts Loki Lie-smith had not lost, was All-Speak.

 

“Me, I’m not invading anywhere,” he managed. “Just passing through, after escaping their prison system.”

 

Their eyebrows raised in unison, to match their similar shocked expressions.

 

Loki decided then that they were most likely twins.

 

“They did a real number on you,” Pietro murmured.

 

The trickster gave a small, broken laugh, then hissed at the pain in his ribs. “You humans do love stating the obvious.”

 

The two mortals had exchanged glances, and then watched him lose consciousness once again.

 

~~

 

They were still there when he next awoke, somewhere warmer; although the taller of the pair, a pale man with only slightly stronger and sharper fey features than his sister making him pretty as well as handsome, was asleep in an armchair in the far corner of the room. Nearer to Loki was the lady, who had hair of a rusty dark auburn, almost brown, like dried blood. Her eyes were greener than her brother’s, but still dark, and similar enough in shape as to share many of his expressions and facial tics.

 

Seeing more clearly now, the trickster could also discern that she had a crackling aura of protective magic thrumming out from herself and throughout the whole of the humble building that they occupied. Her magic, where Loki could see it out of the corners of his eyes, was a bright and vivid red-violet.

 

The witch had been examining Loki’s armor, piece by piece, running her hands over the metal and leather as she spread them out on a nearby table to dry, slush-soaked as all of the fallen god’s clothing had been when they had found him. Now, she set it down and pivoted her chair just a little to better face him, with eyebrows raised in an expectant expression.

 

The trickster realized then that he had, at some point, been dressed in light, casual Midgardian clothes which were, he would later discover, known as a t-shirt and sweatpants. When he looked up from his own shirt back toward the witch, she was still staring right back at him boldy, though her fingers fidgeting a little where they gripped the arms of the chair on either side of her loosely, suggested that she was still sensible enough to be afraid.

 

She pushed a loose lock of hair out of her face to tuck behind one ear as she stared. When he didn’t speak, after nearly a minute, she nodded, as if confirming her suspicion that he would be a cagey type.

 

“So,” she said. “You thawed out and look more human-like now, but I get the feeling you’re really not. I’ve known a couple of blue humans, mostly one a long time ago back in Germany, but I somehow don’t think you’re one of them.”

 

She glanced back down toward his armor for a moment, then rested her elbows on her knees to lean a bit closer to him, without pushing into his space or being perceived in any way threatening.

 

“My name is Wanda. Wanda Maximoff. Who are you and why are you not quite speaking any language I recognize, but yet I can still understand you, and it sounds not quite like Romani or German?” She smiled a little apologetically. “Not just earlier––um––you, ah, talked a lot in your sleep, but if it helps, we now know we did right, not exactly raising any local anti-extraterrestrial alarms, from the sounds of it, which is good. They hunt people like us, too.”

 

The god tilted his head just a little and raised both eyebrows, lips quirked in silent questioning, since he wasn’t quite ready to try his voice again yet.

 

“We have mutated x-genes, and they give us… abilities.”

 

 _Ah_ , Loki thought. _Very useful_. He nodded just slightly, to indicate he understood. _Similar to qualities of Eternals or Deviants, yet milder,_ he theorized silently. _Still mortal, yet not entirely stable, but not nearly to the extent of any Deviant_.

 

As a mage, full of such limitless curiosity as he was, he couldn’t help but re-examine she and her brother more shrewdly, making a case study out of each of them: the single set of overhasty footfalls before he had regained vision suggested the witch’s brother to be gifted with truly impressive feats of speed. Wanda herself, on the other hand, was a far trickier weapon to identify the features and functions of.

 

Her brow furrowed slightly as she watched his face. “Speaking of usually-inhuman capabilities, it seems your injuries are also healing unnaturally fast, but they still don’t look so good. Physical and metaphysical ones both, the latter being far worse.”

 

Loki remained tense under her regard, uncertain whether or not he wanted to know what she and her brother must have heard his say. He remembered what his dreams had been of, and promptly wished very much that he did not; therefore, he decided that he could let those questions remain unasked, at least for now. “Thank you,” he rasped quietly, with an effort, “for your hospitality so far.”

 

“Who are you?” she asked again, more gently.

 

The trickster hesitated. “I am Loki Friggasson, of Asgard and Jötunnheim.”

 

Slowly, the witch’s eyebrows lifted, until it seemed they might threaten to vanish past her hairline. “You’re serious.”

 

“Quite.”

 

“You’re saying you’re a god?” she sounded only a little dubious.

 

“I was known as one to some of your very distant ancestors, yes.”

 

Her eyebrows lowered and her expression sobered, as she processed that. “You’re saying you’re over a thousand years old.”

 

“A bit over two thousand, actually.”

 

She stared at him unblinking for several long seconds. “Wow. How the mighty have fallen.”

 

Loki’s expression crumpled in a self-deprecating wince.

 

“Er. Sorry.”

 

“It’s hardly an understatement,” he remarked dryly.

 

Wanda smiled a little at that, her eyes still a bit wide in apology. “True.” She opened her mouth again to question, but hesitated. “You look, uh, pretty human. I’m glad it’s not all…” She glanced ceiling-ward pointedly. “Well.”

 

“The Chitauri, while far too numerous for such horrid beings, are not the worst.”

 

“We know,” she said. “He told everyone. In great detail.”

 

“He loves a good monologue even more than I do, yes,” Loki sighed.

 

“You, uh…”

 

He shook his head. “I’d rather not speak of it.” He closed his eyes again, briefly, momentarily too weak to keep them open.

 

“Okay,” she said. “I’m, um, glad you got out.”

 

His eyes opened again cautiously. She was sincere, he realized, and was uncertain what to make of it. He wasn’t on the receiving end of it often from anyone who had half a clue how dangerous he was. This woman was genuinely afraid of him; and yet, he could detect no deception in her words nor their intentions.

 

Briefly he was reminded of Thor and had to glance away quickly.

 

Changing the subject politely, Wanda explained, “We’ve seen a few Chitauri over the past week, and they’re ugly, violent, brute-force infantry with a bunch of big leviathan-like creatures. Whole packs of the huge things pitted against whole cities.”

 

“How many cities left?”

 

“Not enough,” she said, in a pained whisper.

 

At that, Loki felt an uncomfortably horrible gnawing sensation in his stomach. He blamed the unfamiliar dose of sincerity from this witch, for throwing him off, like too-rich food from certain galactic sectors. He almost managed to believe it, for about half a second, before his self-awareness again kicked in, and kicked that idea out his left ear in one fell swoop, leaving him again dwelling on gnawing discomfort.

 

“By the way,” she added, recovering with the quickness of terrible necessity: “all of our governments are starting to collapse as it becomes clear that short of nuking the whole planet and ourselves too, most of our weapons and tech are a bit too behind compared to our charming invaders and military forces the world over aren’t having the best of luck against them.”

 

“Of course,” the god muttered, cynical bitterness dripping from the syllables.

 

“My brother and I were trapped in a military base––well, sort of military, sort of super-nazis––when all hell broke loose. Nowadays we’re running blind through an increasingly apocalyptic landscape: a long roadtrip, aiming us at the only possible safe-haven we think we might be able to trust. I don’t suppose you might happen to know what’s going on here and how to stop the end of my world as I know it, O ye wise old trickster?”

 

Loki began to laugh and it was a dry, ragged, painful sound.

 

“What?”

 

“Out of the frying pan, and into the fire, is that not a saying on this world?”

 

Wanda offered a wry half-smile. “Yeah. Yeah it is.” She handed him a cup of water, then, from the nearby side-table. “Welcome to planet Earth. In my personal experience, it’s always that way down here.”

 

Loki sipped some of it gratefully. “I sabotaged the invasion as best I could, but I was... not altogether myself, despite all efforts to the contrary.”

 

“I can tell you’ve been under recent mind control,” Wanda said softly. “I’m sorry.”

 

He stared at her for a long, thoughtful few moments, at that. He could tell, just by the tone of her voice, that she too had been controlled before, perhaps more than once. Not by Thanos, or she would not be so whole, but by others. The words spilled from him without permission, as though from a wound he couldn’t hold shut anymore: “They used me to access a device known as a cosmic cube. I had knowledge of it because, as Odin’s son, I studied it as a younger mage, before it was lost to all of Asgard.”

 

“I heard about that. Hydra––the people who kept us caged––were looking for it. We managed to steal a lot of data from them in the chaos after a leviathan crashed into the middle of the compound.” She frowned. “It was destroyed, and so was everything around it for about half a mile.”

 

Loki knew that he should stop. Sharing painful personal experiences had never exactly become a familiar habit to him, unless those he loved were involved, and even then the focus had rarely been on himself, and solely himself, left open for the judgement of a stranger. It was a very foreign sensation, but that morbid novelty alone appealed just enough to his curiosity, for him to push on, and see what happened. “Yes. All except for myself.”

 

“How?”

 

“I… Had I been any closer, I wouldn’t have had time or space enough to manipulate with a hasty teleportation, aided by my more icy heritage.” A twitch at the corner of his jaw betrayed his discomfort.

 

“You look good, in blue. Not as cute as some I’ve met, but at least you don’t shed on the carpet nearly as much, I’ll bet,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me your utopia has racists too! What the hell kind of utopia is that?”

 

“A self-absorbed and patriarchal illusion of one,” Loki intoned gravely. “I am only recently quite so disillusioned however, and am still endeavoring to adjust.”

 

“That would do it,” she said, sounding annoyed. “You’ll find America pretty similar, in that regard. Sorry.”

 

“Just passing through, anyway,” he muttered. “Had I been a better potential pawn, perhaps they would have only sent me ahead to handle the invasion myself, and had me open the portal from the other side but I––turned down a deal they offered me. They wanted to offer me the earth, I might have insisted on Asgard, and been summarily enslaved.” He grimaced a bit at the memory.

 

“Why Asgard?”

 

“Because I am not actually a fool, and I let on that I cared too much for reasons they could not help but be suspicious of. I should’ve known better, but I really didn’t want to damage Nifelheim given my daughter’s kingdom borders the Nameless City there, Jotunnheim or Muspellheim would’ve murdered me before I could retrieve any of their resources worth baiting Thanos with, Dvargerheim would have deflected my arrival somehow because they’re horrifically clever and all hate me more than any other outsider after I conned one of them out of beheading me, Svartalfheim has nothing worth offerin any longer and is a desolate waste, and Vanaheim is where my mother’s kin reside and she would possibly slit my throat for putting their whole world at risk.”

 

Wanda blinked at him. “You really _do_ enjoy monologuing.”

 

“I have a very charming voice.”

 

She scoffed at him. “So you could have prevented all of this… by taking over the Earth?”

 

He shrugged. “I probably would have tricked some lot of mortals of sufficient power I happened learn about on my last visit here into destroying the portal before much more than one, maybe two cities were severely damaged. Not eradicated as Thanos is doing, though. More like a horrible earthquake in a place unaccustomed to them, really.”

 

“Wow,” she deadpanned, droll. “How kind.”

 

“At least, in the end, I managed to rebel before the tesseract’s powers could overwhelm and destroy me, but still lost... some minor things.” He frowned deeply, shuddering a bit at the sensation of loss he couldn’t fully explain or understand, but which haunted him regardless. “I destroyed the cube, or they would have had the Earth on that third day, and made arrangements to bring the rest of Thanos’ forces here, long before now.”

 

Wanda’s face fell. “Oh.”

 

“Serves them right for working so hard to force my magic to recuperate unnaturally fast, the better to put me to use to that end,” he muttered coldly.

 

She covered her mouth with one hand. “Shit.”

 

“Indeed.”

 

“Can you call home for backup?”

 

His eyes squeezed shut. “I no longer am welcome there. I fell very far from home, before Thanos found and captured me.”

 

“Fell from where?”

 

He chuckled. “It felt like everywhere that should never have been. It was a… blasted-open hole in reality. A butchered, broken-open weak spot between all the worlds of Yggrdrasil. Instead of catching on any other branches… I just kept falling.”

 

“Long story?”

 

He nodded.

 

“To do with the blue?”

 

He looked at her a bit sharply, then. She was terribly perceptive.

 

“That’s a yes.” She smirked a little.

 

He shrugged. “Fine, yes.”

 

“You said you’re not welcome there. What did you do that your, uh, fall wouldn’t be enough to get you at least some public sympathy?”

 

“The... reasons for my fall were all ultimately caused by crimes I committed in a fit of madness and desperate pride which filled me with hatred and a need to prove myself by great and terrible means,” Loki said slowly. “Asgard will not be able to travel here, either, in the absence of any device like the tesseract which might allow any Aesir a successful return-trip home. Anyone they did send would be stranded, given their recent loss of the Bïfrost.”

 

Wanda looked increasingly stricken.

 

“Whose home is this?” Loki asked, realizing there were photographs on the wall of people who looked nothing like the twins. They dressed in rather garish shirts and spiked shoes. The large leather bag leaned against the door of a nearby closet, and the various metal clubs therein, featured in the background of a few of the photos.

 

She shook her head. “We don’t know. This is a... this whole town was abandoned. We found you on our way toward it. We’ve only been here one day, trying to figure out what happened here. There are three homes destroyed, and all others are simply abandoned, half of them emptied out of valuables, but half of them not.”

 

“They were collected, then,” Loki said. “It is... a part of what the Chitauri do on worlds they wish to claim. They are a manufactured race, a cloning-based one, and upon encountering any new race of sentient beings, they have a tendency to abduct samples from various populations, and... try to ‘discern their usefulness’ in ways.”

 

Wanda’s expression looked suddenly very closed and distant. “I see.”

 

He nodded. “Much like yourself, then.”

 

Her lips thinned nervously and she glanced down at the floor. “Yeah.”

 

Loki’s brow furrowed. “I am merely lucky, in that my nature as a shape-shifter and a Jötunn makes my DNA too unstable for them to make such use of once it is too far from the rest of my body, soul, and magics, which was part of why they put me under such complete control. I could not contribute my powers to their genetic stock, and they distrusted me all the more for that, on top of my reputation as a god of lies.”

 

“I heard about mass disappearances, in places that didn’t seem otherwise affected, too far from the cities, but there’s usuallys till property damage. I never imagined they were leaving just…” She looked around the house with wider eyes suddenly. “This is sick.”

 

“Yes. They usually try to send down at least one scout. If found by the targets, such a soldier can revert to defensive tactics, which might explain the property damage.”

 

“Some people managed to get away, some didn’t hear in time and just got...”

 

“Stolen,” Loki concluded for her. “Yes.”

 

“How?”

 

“Abruptly, straight from wherever they were in the target collection area, to holding cells.”

 

The witch covered her mouth with her palm for a moment, clearly caught up in the imagined horror for a moment. “That would explain a lot,” she said quietly.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

She looked at him sharply. “Do you have reasons to be?”

 

“I had no willing part in any of this, save for when I willed against the commands I had been previously given.”

 

After a few moments longer, Wanda pulled up a wooden chair nearer to the couch that Loki occupied, and sat down facing him. “Do you owe us a boon? Is that still how things work with gods?”

 

“You did possibly save my life, and did not slaughter me on sight for being a monster. You have also sheltered me through my incapacitation. It would have otherwise taken me longer to heal this far without your efforts,” he admitted. “I am, however, a trickster. I work in deals, more than boons.”

 

“We need to stay safe, and find... an old friend of our father’s. That’s all we know about the man we’re looking for––and, in truth, all we really know about our father in the least,” Wanda explained, her tone hard. She knew he would agree, and that it was important to his ability to keep up with them for him to know these details, but being revealing about herself with a relative stranger was an unfamiliar task to her too, as much as it was to Loki.

 

The world ending tended to shift the priorities of even the most selfish, when traveling in groups was so beneficial to one’s chances of survival as it was in the world outside this borrowed, too-empty house.

 

Loki could feel it too. “Where did you learn of him?” he asked gently.

 

“It was our mother’s last wish that we find him and learn from him, but that was a long time ago and we’ve been through a different sort of educational system since then, ever since Hydra caught us,” Wanda told him. “You’re not welcome in Asgard, and aren’t a fan of the Chitauri, so it looks like you’re earthbound for a while.”

 

She then leaned forward further, her hands folding purposefully as her elbows slid a bit further and she leaned a little closer, like they were already in on the same game. “You’re also still injured pretty badly. At the rate you’re healing, you should be able to walk as soon as tomorrow, but your magic and, uh...” She looked simultaneously at him and through him, for a moment, and from her expression, the sight wasn’t an encouraging one. 

 

Loki’s jaw clenched only a little. He didn’t visibly show the burn of shame that he felt at his own weakness that had been so engrained over so very many centuries, but keeping a calm exterior did take a toll, and the corners of his eyes burned with it.

 

Wanda sighed. “You’ll be very limited. The only comparison I can think of is a stroke patient. Parts of your connection to your magics, in some places more than others, are disrupted, or cut; you’ll probably have to re-forge new connections to regain... full functionality.”

 

“You’ve a strong gift, to see so much as that.”

 

“And you’re far too weak to hide a damn thing from me, or that still wouldn’t help me,” she added, sounding like she imagined that that degree of exertion and power-loss must have really, really hurt to achieve. “Travel-spells are out for you, for a long time. That much, I could infer from the traces of magic around you from your arrival in the woods. All data that we found suggested that your teleportation went very awry by your own design, albeit while you were compromised by other forces––primarily resisting mind-control from Thanos, via the tesseract. The two areas of damage, defensive and travel-related alike, will probably seem to overlap, until they properly heal.”

 

After looking through her a bit more than at her for several seconds, Loki concluded softly, “Your magic is... strange, even to me.”

 

“It’s a little reliant on a terrestrial elder-god, sometimes, but keep that to yourself, please,” she explained quietly. “Also I’m a mutant, and I have other powers as well. I am telekinetic, and have access to forms of chaos magic under duress.”

 

“Ah,” Loki said, nodding slightly. It was going to be difficult not to like this woman, he realized, and tried promptly to shake off the thought mentally. “I see.” He then cleared his throat and changed the subject back to his own situation: “So, since it would seem that I am helpless in this world as I recuperate my magics and my physical strength both, whilst the Earth is feeling less than kind toward all non-humans from other worlds, and Asgard is out of reach for at least the next few years while they rebuild the Bïfrost,” Loki summarized, now in mock-airy tones.

 

The witch snorted. “At least your monologues are more lyrical, I’ll grant you.”

 

Then he laughed a little, self-deprecating, and concluded, “Aesthetic critiques aside: I do believe that puts me in a position wherein it’s in my best interests to have allies that I can trust, and thus also it might be important to help keep them alive and safe, if a couple of powerful mortals such as a chaotic sorceress and her twin brother––who, I believe, can achieve impressive speeds, if I recall the great rapidity of his footsteps shortly before we met––might be inclined to forge such an alliance.”

 

Nodding at him in confirmation, Wanda half-smiled. “That would be nice. Swear an oath to be our ally until we either defeat this world-destroying fucker or die trying?”

 

“Cheeky,” the god teased.

 

“I’ve been around places within the astral plane wherein people have heard of you. Chaos magic isn’t the most common specialty, after all.”

 

Loki couldn’t help but grin at her wickedly outright, at that. “You have my word, Wanda Maximoff, to our alliance in the name of necessary chaos,” he murmured, sounding curious.

 

Then he cooly suggested, “If you could begin by explaining the nature of the organization you were formerly imprisoned by, their resources, and what we may expect from their chase of you, as well as any further information about the movements of Chitauri forces known to you, we can then use your information in combination with my own in order to better facilitate an ideally Thanos-free universe for ourselves someday.” He glanced toward her still-sleeping brother, and then back to her. “Should your brother join us?”

 

“Perhaps,” the witch murmured, “but he is not always clear-headed when he is busy worrying for our safety. He originally wanted me to tie up your wrists.” She shook her head at her brother fondly. “He was carrying me mid-stride when we caught sight of your crash-landing. Let him rest, while I begin explaining the positions of all of the pieces on our battlefields as we know it, and where we think we are on it, right?” she challenged, smiling sharply.

 

“If you could, please,” Loki countered, a flicker of geniunely warm amusement making his green eyes look a bit less dark, for the first time since he had awoken.

 

And so she began to explain, and then they both began to plot, and by the time her brother Pietro awoke and joined them, they had a few plans already up for consideration, and he caught up quickly enough. Loki seemed fascinated by the man’s speed-related powers and kept getting occasionally distracted by trying to figure out how they worked.

 

By dawn, they had acquired means of transport that would be less conspicuous and exhausting both for Pietro (he had told Loki point-blank that he and Wanda would never carry the god while he was in his Asgardian armor ever again, _especially while wet_ ) in the form of a large SUV, and other various supplies quietly looted from around the abandoned town. They hit the road then, heading toward New York State.

 

~~

 

The Chitauri had taken hostage many humans from all over the world, and invaded numerous towns and a few major cities, within the first two weeks after the armada’s arrival on earth. Vast destruction and loss of life occurred wherever one of the two thousand ships of the fleet landed, all over the world. Governments fell and armies were absorbed by whatever was left of leadership forces and militias in neighboring nations without hesitation, intent only on the common enemy of the Chitauri.

 

Through that disorder and destruction, dodging forces Chitauri and human alike––if only for how violently even rational-seeming humans might react to being faced with two superhumanly powerful mutants and a recuperating alien sorcerer who happened to also be an ancient trickster god––Loki and the Maximoff twins made their way up the east coast to New York, and eventually a school for “gifted youngsters” with only three major catastrophes, and it only took them a week and a half.

 

By the time they reached the school, it was clear that something was very wrong. Wanda was agitated to the point of nervous anxiety as soon as they were in sight of the gate. They were halfway up the driveway before she grabbed both Pietro’s shoulder and Loki’s from her place in the back seat, leaning between them from the back seat. “Stop.”

 

The trickster god at the wheel slowly hit the brakes. He had learned the art of driving very quickly. “What is it?”

 

Wanda looked almost nauseated. “Well for one, I don’t think Xavier’s here; he would’ve reached out to me by now, but there’s something else... something that just feels _wrong_. You can’t feel it?”

 

“I cannot,” Loki assured her gently. “I am not as psychically sensitive as yourself, however, Wanda; it’s possible that if this is something you’re detecting from a wavelength closer to telepathic, I would not be aware of it either. Tell us what you’re feeling.”

 

Pietro shot him an odd look.

 

The god ignored him.

 

“Fear,” Wanda said. “Fear and... fire.”

 

“Fire?” Loki asked softly.

 

“I’m trying to see past the fire, but the flames are too high. And with it there’s just so much fear-” the witch murmured, reaching out and touching two fingers to Loki’s temple with one hand while her other reached down and put the car into park, right before Loki’s eyes rolled back in his head and his muscles jerked as if they’d been shocked.

 

The god snapped back into awareness quickly, forcing himself to focus the connection and allow Wanda enough access to let him help her process the psychic flow of data. There was a long moment where he felt submerged before he could quite open his eyes and see clearly out of them again.

 

“That’s an unusual flame,” Loki said softly. “And afraid, yes, but something else... she’s not in control. Something is keeping these impressions vague, to anyone less sensitive than yourself, Wanda.”

 

“You’re right,” she said softly, after a long moment. “It’s so strong, though.”

 

“Yes,” the trickster concurred, sounding thoughtful. “I’m now curious, and do insist we continue as planned.”

 

“Okay,” Wanda said softly.

 

“Do you need aid adjusting your shields?” he inquired softly.

 

Pietro looked concerned, at that.

 

“I’m fine. It’s just... trying to turn that volume down is a counter-intuitive process, but it’s one I’m used to. I’m ready. Go on,” she told Loki, her touch retreating as she sat back in her seat again, and tilted her head back. “Oh, there’s Dr. Grey knocking. She’s one mother mentioned, wasn’t she, Pietro?”

 

“Yes,” her brother whispered, hesitantly.

 

Wanda met Loki’s eyes with fear visible in every line in her too-young face.

 

Loki nodded, and hoped against his own expectations that it wasn’t pure bluster this time when the young witch’s eyes rolled back and she settled into a trance for a few minutes.

 

“is she-” Pietro started.

 

“Shh,” Loki hissed, “This is expected, from this sort of telepathy-based psychic communication. She’s not in danger yet.”

 

“Yet?” he demanded.

 

“I am willing to swear to you, Pietro Maximoff, that the moment she is in danger that I am aware of, whilst I am physically and mystically capable of contacting you, that you will know,” Loki swore, smiling dangerously. “She’s wise enough and capable enough of concealing some of her intentions from me that I feel fairly comfortable in that oath, and will offer it freely.

 

Wanda then gasped sharply and refocused on the road ahead. “Wow, everyone with any sort of psychic link to me says you should shut up, Loki, and maybe that you’re a bit of a windbag.”

 

“Not untrue,” Pietro murmured.

 

“Everyone’s a critic,” Loki muttered.

 

“I told you not to let him watch those cartoons,” Wanda sighed at her brother. “Also, go forth, Loki. We’re welcome.”

 

The trickster put the vehicle back in gear, but kept ready to hit the brakes, in case of possibly unforeseen betrayals.

 

They reached the gate and the doors swung open for them.

 

“That’s not creepy or anything,” Pietro commented dryly. “Not ominous or a sign we should turn back now or die horribly, no, not at all.”

 

“I’m glad you agree,” Loki deadpanned.

 

The mortal speedster swore at him the rest of the way down the mansion grounds’ extended driveway. There were people watching their approach, not immediately visible, but both Wanda and Loki could detect them at the edges of their awareness. They still managed to park in front of the main mansion proper before anyone stepped out to greet them openly.

 

The woman who met them before they even set foot upon the porch was an intimidatingly immaculate being, with long white-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, wearing a clingy white sweater and a medium-length white skirt with a slit up to her mid-thigh on one side. She had a very professional, polished sort of smile. “How strange, that Jean and I could only detect two of you, but everyone along the path told us there were three in your car, all along the way, corroborated by Miss Maximoff.” She looked at Loki very hard. “That makes us _nervous_.”

 

The trickster had regained only a little of his magic: just enough, in fact, to invest in renewing the spells he normally wore about him like a cloak, to hide himself from the likes of Heimdall’s sight, and also inconvenient telepathic persons and powerful objects both. He thus smiled beatifically at the woman in white. “I am Loki, and I cannot help that I am invisible to you,” he lied easily. “It is in my kind’s nature.”

 

“I told Jean he’s a friend, when she asked me at the second gate, Miss Frost,” Wanda said.

 

“Jean is more of an optimist than I’ve ever been, and these days I’m aware of a whole new variety of threat in this world, from outside it,” said the woman in white. “What do you really know of him, dears? I did not peek.” She tapped her temple illustratively.

 

Loki was very glad she could not see into him. She reminded him a great deal of Amora, but with a steadiness and an air of impeccable restraint his dear friend the Enchantress had never exactly been known for. The lady in white was the most intelligent person in this entire mansion, and she knew it, and now she knew that the trickster did too.

 

And Emma Frost smiled at him even more brightly.

 

He might have felt a faint chill, despite himself. He might have been tempted by the likes of her, when he was younger, but now she reminded him of a slightly more clinical version of Angrboða, too, and he had aged a great deal since that storm had seiged his heart. So he smiled at her, cool and charming, in response, but no more.

 

“He’s protected my sister and I even when he didn’t have to,” Pietro said. “He understands magic the way she does, in a way I’m kind of sickly jealous over, but he also saved my life two days ago, and he’s a brilliant jackass, so I’m getting over it.”

 

Loki did only a very slight double-take in shock. Of all the things he hadn’t actually expected from the speedster, sincere trust and acceptance were at the top of the list and for just a moment the god of lies was left slightly reeling.

 

“He’s got self-image issues regarding some of his natural Jotunn aspects, probably due to his being adopted. He’s a father, and I’d say probably a good one, but his kids are long grown up, and I think he misses them often. He might have committed war crimes, but I think he mostly regrets them. _Mostly._ He also inexplicably knows how difficult it is to run in heels, despite being an alien viking god, and he has a lovely singing voice,” Wanda rattled off, with casual confidence. “He’s a friend, Emma.”

 

Quietly, in the very back of the trickster’s mind, a small voice pointed out that no one else not kin to him had ever actually defended him quite like this. Usually, it was Thor and Frigga’s specialty, with a few humbling occasions his children had similarly supported him when he felt least deserving of it. This was on another level of surreal, in comparison. Loki was staring at the young witch with a look of mild alarm and a little awe, also surprised that she had learned quite so much, and clearly been paying closer attention than he’d realized, during their so-called road-trip to this place.

 

Emma looked between them, and at Pietro’s unamused glare, and nodded thoughtfully, meeting the trickster’s gaze when he looked over to meet it after feeling her stare for a few moments. “You’re not fully invisible, this close up.”

 

“For now,” Loki concurred easily.

 

Her eyes narrowed a little further, but the front door opened behind her. “Come in, then. Let us all get to know one another better, and see if we can’t work on saving the world.”

 

The trio all nodded in assent, and followed her when she turned on her heel to guide them through the mansion’s halls.

 

~~

 

In the following weeks, the puzzle of Dr. Jean Grey had taken up at least a third of Loki’s attention for most of the duration of his stay amongst the X-men.

 

Her psychic power, and Emma Frost’s, in combination, kept the Mansion grounds clear of intruders by sending away anyone not approved by both women: be they Chitauri, human, or otherwise. It was thus now an overcrowded safe-haven for the families of the students and most of the upstairs rooms had been given over to those who had nowhere else to go, whether they were mutants or not.

 

Jean looked at Loki, and could barely see him.

 

Loki looked at her and saw just another telepath... unless he looked at her whilst he also had a hand touching Wanda’s arm or shoulder; on those occasions, he could see flames, though the remaining connection with him that she had maintained since the initial connection before they reached the gate.

 

Something under the surface of the woman known as Dr. Jean Grey was made all of alien celestial fire, but under the surface it remained, and Loki was not feeling at all inclined to change that, so he said nothing about it to the others, and quietly took the twins aside to advise them similarly, careful to shield their whole trio from being overheard even by the keenest ears within the mansion.

 

~~

 

All the rest of the mansion’s inhabitants accepted Loki with almost startling ease into their lives, as far as the trickster was concerned.

 

He spent the rest of those first two weeks of his stay recuperating his magic, sparring verbally with Emma Frost, and occasionally taking part in rescue missions until he proved himself as a strategist and both Miss Frost and Scott Summers finally took the Wolverine’s vehement recommendations and included him in most of their mission-planning sessions and overall strategy meetings, along with Ororo Munroe who had seemed to like him right away, amused by his wit and asking casual questions to suss out his wisdom and any knowledge he might have to impart as the long-lived creature that he was.

 

Only Dr. Jean Grey remained so instinctively uneasy about his presence at all such meetings, though she didn’t say as much directly. She didn’t, in fact, comment either way: for or against, but the others didn’t seem to notice, which Loki quietly attributed to a bit of psychic misdirection on her part, given how otherwise sharp the leaders of the X-men were.

 

Also at those meetings, of course, were Erik Lehnsherr and the enigmatic lady known as Mystique, whose blue appearance Loki had been initially startled by. She had been offended, right up until he’d turned blue before her with an effort of will, and she had understood; it had been an interesting way to begin the introduction of himself to the whole group. Aside from that interaction, both she and Erik kept their own counsel, when it came to their feelings about Loki, be they trustful or distrustful, and Loki admired their shrewdness for it.

 

The rest of the inhabitants of the mansion, the less junior ones, accepted a god of mischief in their company with an almost alarming degree of enthusiasm. His first day in the mansion, he was invited to a game of poker, and taught the rules. The other players had been Remy Lebeau, Mystique, Ororo, Logan, Jubilation Lee, Kurt Wagner, Kitty Pryde, and a girl known only (even to her friends, apparently) as Rogue. All of them, it became very clear to Loki, were card-sharks of varying levels of accomplishment and expertise.

 

It had taken Loki three rounds to get a feel for the game.

 

Then, slowly, he’d began to really show them how it was done.

 

 Ever since then, most poker games in the mansion had become team efforts to defeat Loki, to the amusement of all.

 

There was, inevitably, and incident between himself and Bobby Drake, on one of the occasions Loki was invited into the Danger Room. It was an innocent mistake: the young man had meant to encase an enemy in Ice, and had accidentally encased Loki’s own boots up to the knees as well, not realizing the trickster had been on the robot’s opposite flank.

 

“Uh... why are you blue, Loki?” Rogue asked, over the comms. “Should we be worried, or is this normal for you?”

 

“I’m Jötunn,” the god said, glad his voice sounded steadier than he felt, but then he broke free of the ice, and a thought occurred to him. His magic was still very limited, the damages healing slower than any others he had ever experienced in his life, but his ice... his ice was not subject to those limitations. He was in a safe practice environment, and his current allies looked at him with interest, concern, amazement and innocent curiosity, not condemnation.

 

Something broke open in his heart like a spring thaw and it savored of elation as Loki said, beginning to smile helplessly, “Observe.” Then he brought the temperature of the whole room down, ice growing upward in vast spikes at his will, outward from his body and up from the ground, piercing the robot in front of him and spiraling out to similarly destroy three or four others.

 

It was tiring, and unfamiliar, but there was something thrilling about the feel of his own now-freezing-cold-but-still-unfrozen blood pumping and stretching out like this felt like spreading wings he’d never before tried to use: acute soreness and pain, but also relief, and a desire to take to the air and fly with these sensations as they overtook him.

 

“Why haven’t you fought like that long before now?” Scott demanded, after the Danger Room session was over.

 

Loki shrugged, smiling helplessly with exhaustion and relief, amused beyond words that this, of all things, was the only censure his actions had earned. “I couldn’t. For a lot of reasons. I... “ He cleared his throat. “I lived a very long time before I knew my true nature, and until recently I resented it deeply: being a frost Jötunn, rather than Aesir. I’ve truly never been capable of embracing that before now. I thank you, and your team, for providing me a place I felt secure enough to do so without risk to myself an my own sanity. I had a feeling that the only way around that block would be coincidence or to trick myself into it and… you all succeeded, however accidentally.”

 

The X-men’s leader sobered a little. “Oh. Right. You did mention the adoption... those powers are just from being Jötunn, then?”

 

Loki nodded. “Of a particular elemental tribe, yes.”

 

Scott nodded. “Okay. I’m glad you’re okay, then.” He smiled a little. “And I can’t wait to see you use that properly in the field. You and Bobby should practice more together, and learn each other’s limitations, and coordinate your attacks since you’re both effectively wielding similar weapons.” He squeezed Loki’s shoulder briefly, before leaving him to debrief a couple of the younger X-men on how they might improve.

 

Kurt Wagner appeared next to Loki then, in a puff of smoke, his spaded tale waving back and forth in an enthusiastic arc. “You were blue.”

 

Loki looked at the young mutant, taking in not for the first time his fine dark blue fur, bright yellow eyes, pointed ears, tail, tridactyl hands, and other aspects of his appearance the trickster might have habitually considered signs of Fey heritage; although the bone structure of the Incredible Nightcrawler’s hind-limbs, his teleportation capabilities, and his impeccable knack for disappearing into the shadows, made Loki suspect something still more unique than Fey to reside in this one’s family tree: perhaps an Eternal, or something related to one of them. “I was indeed blue,” said the god.

 

“Can I see that again?”

 

Loki let himself embrace cold again, within his own heart and mind, and sighed at how strangely comfortable it felt, as well as how it made him feel stronger, and made his skin feel a little heavier and tougher, as he changed color-schemes.

 

Kurt’s eyes widened and he stood taller, the tip of his tail flicking a bit as he examined the trickster god’s markings and reached out to touch his sleeve, feeling how he seemed to radiate cold. “That is so awesome!”

 

Helplessly, and a bit brokenly, Loki found himself smiling with more sincerity than he’d been capable of in a long time. “Thank you.”

 

~~

 

The first Leviathan successfully taken down in New York was taken out by Iron Man. The first armada ship successfully destroyed, was eradicated and blasted to hell by Tony Stark, on the third day of the invasion.

 

It was a blur of chaotic destruction from there on out.

 

The whole of S.H.I.E.L.D. going into convulsions as the heads of Hydra reared once more––forced into the light of day by the chaotic events and the collapse of the first few U.N. member nations falling under control or bombardment by Chitauri forces––certainly didn’t help matters, and soon things were... all far more incredibly broken than any amounts of money could ever fix.

 

Within two months, under the siege warfare of Chitauri against humanity around the globe, empires had fallen and a new sense of global loss and mourning brought the remaining communities of survivors together with a new sense of shared purpose that dissolved old grudges between many formerly warring peoples around the world, if only for a time. From out of the wild and the dark, new communities of necessity developed, as the Chitauri forces began to lose strength, wearing themselves down against the likes of (as Tony called them) the Reformed Organization Formerly Known As S.H.I.E.L.D., and the team of heroes who came to be known as the Avengers, along with other teams of super-humans the world over: some government-sanctioned, others just formed organically by people trying to protect their loved ones.

 

It had become difficult, in the wake of so much societal collapse, for people to get in contact with those valuable people who still had the power to provide certain critical types of aid. Particularly, it had become a challenge to reach Tony Stark, especially in the wake of his sharp and painful falling out with Pepper Potts.

 

As a result, Tony was used to getting lassoed into local conflicts that might happen to crash into him while he was making a long flight in one of the suits between the east and west coasts of North America. People in need of help saw Iron Man, and innovative and occasionally violent as their alert-methods could sometimes be, they would _find_ a way to get his attention, or they would _make_ one.

 

Usually, though, if he was in a jet with the rest of the Avengers, on their way to all-out-war with some Chitauri stronghold, the recognition-factor being much lower, such lassos tended to be rather more unexpected.

 

Especially in the form of a tall, dark and painfully handsome viking trickster god appearing in the middle of the jet in question, his hands raised with bare palms forward. “I come in peace, and I seek Parley, or perhaps take me to your leader if you’re more of a traditionalist? If you’d be so kind?” Loki greeted them all, in dry and level tones.

 

Tony almost dropped the suit’s helmet, even though his free arm had reflexively risen and aimed one bright-glowing repulsor at the sudden new-arrival on the plane. Natasha, Steve, and Hawkeye also all leveled weapons toward him. Only Bruce stayed very, very still, for good reason, letting Steve step between him and Loki almost before the trickster could get a glimpse of him.

 

A long pause followed, as Loki continued to stare at them expectantly, doing no harm and wearing a charming con-man’s smile, full of confident assurance.

 

Tony let the repulsor power down, but didn’t lower it. “Who are you?”

 

“Loki Lie-smith.”

 

The archer and the assassin both narrowed their eyes at him, as though both recalling something unsettling. Seeing it in one another’s expressions, they exchanged eloquent looks that caught the god’s notice.

 

“Those of you with S.H.I.E.L.D. connections may recall my brother from an incident in New Mexico just over a year and a half before the arrival of the Chitauri,” Loki offered them, seeing understanding in their gazes leveled his way. “I was responsible for sending the Destroyer, out of a toxic combination of panic, decoherence of a cornerstone of my identity and sheer blood-lusting hubris. I regret that action, and will willingly admit to that mistake. Furthermore, I am not here by the will of Asgard, nor am I even welcome there any longer. I was brought back to your world by the Chitauri as their prisoner and am thus more than happy to ally myself with humans for the time being, and work towards the mutual goal of destroying Thanos and the Chitarui.”

 

“Well, I’m won over so far,” Tony mused, appreciative of someone who clearly enjoyed the sound of his own voice nearly as much as the inventor himself enjoyed his own. “You need us for something?”

 

“Why yes, Mr. Stark, my associates and I could use the Avengers’ aid, and provide you some in turn as well,” Loki concurred, grinning brightly and winningly. “I did also take the liberty of changing your flight plans a few hours ago. You’ll be landing in our hangar in Westchester, New York, in approximately twenty-five minutes now. I do apologize for causing the glitch which allowed your sentient virtual guardian construct to be incapable of telling you about that.”

 

The inventor was so angry he saw red for a second, but managed to keep himself still and breathe in and out slowly at least twice, settling his reaction on offended awe and instant hatred. “You altered JARVIS?”

 

“No,” Loki insisted, with surprising vehemence. “I misdirected a few protocols: a one-time error, and a short-term distraction-spell: that was all. I made no alterations to his protocols or programming, and I would never presume to do so, especially without his permission.”

 

Tony’s hatred from a few moments before evaporated back into fascinated appraisal in record time. It wasn’t often that he heard a voice aside from is own trying to impress on people a respect for JARVIS’s personhood. It made him suspicious, as well. “What is it you need from us?”

 

“In truth, I believe we might form something of an alliance between your Avengers, and those who house me,” the trickster explained. “They have been crucial to the survival of thousands so far, many of them mutants, but plenty of humans lacking extraordinary gifts as well. Perhaps you’ve heard of the X-men, the Brotherhood, and the Hellions all?”

 

The Avengers all suddenly paid keener attention, because yes, they all had.

 

“I see from your faces that you all do, and that the latter two names on the list do disturb you,” Loki observed. “In the case of the Hellions, they are reunited under that name, along with the rest of Miss Frost’s students who would fight against the Chitauri, and is at best informal-usage.”

 

“And the Brotherhood?” Natasha inquired sharply.

 

Inclining his head, the trickster admitted, “Personally, I was wary of the Brotherhood myself, but the global alien threat has had quite a sobering effect upon their leader, and his mutant supremacist rhetoric has made no appearance for the past two months.”

 

At Natasha’s particularly dubious scoff, the god chuckled and added for good measure: “Not even when the Friends of Humanity and Genosha joined forces in an attempt to use the Chitauri invasion to eradicate as much of mutant-kind from this world as possible by forcing the remains of the Genoshan government and several other not-very-mutant-friendly remaining U.N. member nations, to institute a mandatory draft for super-humans to send them all to the front lines.”

 

His eyes narrowed, as he watched the Avengers exchange a few uncomfortable glances at that, and took another step forward very slowly, fixing his stare back on Stark. “That, of course, is now where thousands of them so far have been killed, forced to try and defend the earth even when it is clearly beyond their capabilities, for not all mutants are actually meant for such intense warfare, but of course the first communities drafted were the Morlocks, who were penned up like animals and dropped into the middle of battle-fields.” Loki’s expression was one of anger and disgust, at that.

 

That sobered the Avengers all still further.

 

“We’d been aware of the drafts from various roaming militias, the witch-hunts for mutants and other super-humans, in the hopes of forcing them to defend the earth even against their wills,” Natasha said. “We’ve been endeavoring to stop that, same as you. Some of us know all too well what forced military service, no different from enslavement, is truly like to endure.”

 

Loki nodded respectfully toward her. “That was the impression I got, yes. I am glad that I was not wrong, in making that judgement of your team.”

 

“Why the urgency?” Bruce asked. “Why hijack our flight?”

 

“Because the Chitauri took the leader of the X-men within mere days of their arrival on earth,” Loki said. “We only just found out his fate, and that for now he remains alive, but they are using him as a weapon, under their control fully with no more will of his own. We will need your resources, as well as our own, to stand any chance of retrieving Charles Xavier alive. Once he is back amongst his team and has time to recover, we may even be able to use him, with the aid of Emma Frost and Dr. Jean Grey, to eradicate most of the Chitauri in a single fell swoop using their powers and the device known as Cerebro, which Mr. Lehnsherr has just completed repairs upon.”

 

“Cerebro is a dangerous device to entrust to anyone as powerful as Xavier,” Clint pointed out. “It always has been.”

 

“And yet, it has remained in the possession of the X-men for quite some time, with only a few occasions of horrifying hijacking,” remarked the trickster. He focused particularly on Tony then, once more. “We can end this war. The current design of Cerebro still has limitations; it affects human minds, but the nature of the Chitauri hive-mind is a bit too alien, too different, and even with them out of the way, Thanos and his lieutenants remain. Thus, we will need someone with Midgardian technological and weapons expertise to work with me, and my own capabilities, to make alterations to it which will allow the three resident telepaths to stand any chance of really making any _severe_ impact upon these invading forces, and then afterward drive all the rest out, once they are so weakened.”

 

Tony began to grin at that, and Steve and Clint groaned and muttered about knowing what that look meant, and that they might be all doomed. “Well, now, how can I resist a challenge like that?”

 

Loki’s mouth curled into an intrigued and curious smirk of his own. “I had hoped you would let your wrist be metaphorically twisted.”

 

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Unless there are any objections, guys, I say we join ‘em.”

 

Murmurs of assent from the rest of the Avengers followed, mostly enthusiastic or at least very curious, none actually all that reluctant, save perhaps Natasha, who had run into Magneto once or twice before and had a bit of a grudge against him. She also didn’t like anyone who could take apart almost all of her weapons just because they were metal-based.

 

She still, however, was as intrigued as the rest of them. “You’re from Asgard, then?” she asked lightly, “and I think you suggested in your speech that you cannot go back, but would you, if you could?”

 

Loki looked at her very sharply, then, but had to think about it for a long few moments. “I would see my mother again, and inform her that I am still alive. I would then make my way to Alfheim, where at least my capabilities are more appreciated, and her kin would take me in. I was injured, while enslaved under the Chitauri, in ways it will take me quite some time to recuperate from, before I am capable of such travel. If ever I am again.”

 

“I thought your people used something called the Bïfrost?” she inquired.

 

“Thor shattered it before I fell into an abyss, in the form of a rift in space and time caused by the destruction of the over-active Bïfrost,” Loki responded flatly. “It was after a long fall through unspeakable horrors that I was found and put under mind control by a would-be demigod from the moon of Titan, to you known as Thanos. The Chitauri belonged to him, before I destroyed the artifact that they used to bring themselves here in an effort of will that I believed would lead to my death, but I survived.”

 

“ ** _You_** destroyed the _tesseract_?” Natasha asked sharply.

 

“Yes.”

 

The assassin considered, then nodded. “Thank you. They would have taken it from S.H.I.E.L.D. and at the time we... we would not have been able to stop them.”

 

“I assure you that it was selfishly done.”

 

“Wait, I remember all about the tesseract, and I even talked it over with Dr. Strange, once he was brought it when it became clear magic had been involved in its destruction,” Tony cut in. “He was convinced that whoever had done it had been at least slightly brain-damaged, or possibly had lost all memory and identity. You look more than lucid and functional.”

 

“Appearances can be deceiving,” Loki said, his tone turned a bit caustic and resentful at the too-personal inquiry. “Some of my recent memories are damaged, and so is my magic, and how my powers and my will connect to my gift for magic-wielding itself.”

 

At their horrified looks, he chuckled just a little: soft and self-effacing. “The relevant structures in my brain which are used for those purposes, were all scorched by too much of the tesseract’s power being channeled through me. I was once the only mage capable of traveling the secret paths between all the realms, without either expensive spells requiring vast quantities of dark-energy, or a resource like the tesseract, or even the Bïfrost, and now here I am earthbound, unable to even teleport short distances any longer, and looking at the possibility that I may never so freely roam ever again, if you _must_ know, Mr. Stark.”

 

Tony raised both of his hands. “Wow, okay, I’m sorry. I should’ve realized that was... I’m sorry. That’s none of our business, you’re right to suggest.”

 

The god glared at him a moment longer, then nodded lightly. “I’m glad we have an understanding.”

 

“Now... are you going to stick around for the rest of the flight?” inquired the inventor, grinning flirtatiously all the while.

 

“I did mention I cannot actually teleport,” Loki chided. “This is an illusory projection of myself, but I can linger, if you wish.”

 

“We have a bit of time,” Steve said. “You can explain how Xavier is being held, and what the enemy is using him for. I want to know what we’re getting into.

 

Inclining his head in a mild show of respect, Loki began to explain.

 

~~

 

Tony Stark wasn’t actually sure what to call his instant fixation on the god of lies.

 

It was somewhere between obsessive scientific curiosity and fascination, and infatuation at first sight. Infascination? Something like that.

 

No matter what anyone might’ve chosen to call it, Tony was hooked. Loki so far seemed to be brilliant and broken and gorgeous and untouchable, and perhaps ridiculously powerful, as the Avengers soon learned, shortly after their jet was attacked by the Chitauri before Loki had been explaining things for even five minutes.

 

As the explosions and violent turbulence began, Loki’s projection vanished, only to be shortly after replaced by Loki’s physical self and two X-men: Nightcrawler, and Storm. The teleporter then proffered a hand to Bruce with a grin and offered to take him aboard the attacking enemy ship (which Bruce accepted) while Ororo’s control over the winds kept their plane’s flight path from going to shit despite the questionable flight-tactics they required to dodge further Chitauri attacks.

 

They eventually had to abandon the jet altogether, except Tony, who put on his helmet and managed by hand, only with Ororo’s aid, to get the thing to ground without too much further damage, while the Hulk grounded the Chitauri Leviathan that had attacked them, and a flood of infantry and a smaller glider-ship followed. The Hulk focused on the ship, at which point Loki began... utterly destroying the soldiers.

 

Tony had only just gotten the jet down by the time he noticed all the green fireworks and heard the roar of something vast and monstrous.

 

He really hadn’t expected to see a dragon rise from the fallen infantry as more Leviathans approached them. The scaly creature's body, between great broad wings, looked closer to horse-sized––positively diminutive compared to the Leviathans, but faster, more agile, and with talons apparently ideal for peeling open armour plating––with a long neck, massive wings, a strong spike-tipped tail, and powerful limbs that seemed narrow and almost wolfish except for their grasping eagle-like feet. It did, in fact, breathe fire, and while the Hulk aggressively assaulted one Leviathan, the other was attacked by the dragon, which ferociously trepanned it by clawing and tearing with massive teeth, then lobotomised it by scorching the neural circuitry with a final dose of fire until both of the Chitauri’s monstrosities hit the ground hard.

 

Then the dragon shifted, shrank, and in its place stood Loki, covered in slightly-burnt gore and looking so full of livid rage as to be capable of leveling whole armies if they were to dare approach him, but then he took a few steps forward, and Tony realized that he had a slight limp, and a hand clasped to one side, applying pressure to a wound that hadn’t yet healed.

 

Shortly after that, the trickster’s entire body began to visibly tremble, all at once, and his sense of balance seemed abruptly thrown-off. “They’ve developed a new poison,” he called out. “Marvelous.” Then he fell down to one knee.

 

Tony was only halfway there by the time Nightcrawler appeared at Loki’s side, asking him what he needed. By the time Tony reached them, the god was shaking his head dismissively.

 

“I just need rest, or possibly an impressive energy source,” Loki growled.

 

“Can you convert from something like this?” Tony asked, tapping his reactor.

 

The trickster glanced up at him. “Pardon?”

 

Kneeling down, Tony explained, “This circle here, is the glow from the arc-reactor that powers my armor. I know it’s not exactly magic, but it’s energy, and if you can convert it to a form useable by your magic, that’d do the trick, wouldn’t it?”

 

“It would.” Loki began to half-smile despite himself. “Very clever, Mr. Stark.”

 

“I’m always clever. Stick around, I’ll be happy to prove it.” He hesitated when the god rested a hand squarely over the reactor. “Just leave a bit behind, okay? It’s also powering an electromagnet that keeps little bits of metal shrapnel suspended, and without that they’ll sink into my heart and kill me.”

 

“Well, Erik does owe me a few boons, these days. Perhaps I can make him repay one by fixing that for you,” Loki mused, even as his eyes drifted shut. The power that the reactor contained was indeed useable, but not directly. The conversion would be taxing, but based on how hazy his mind was getting, it was looking like he needed this poison out of his system as soon as he could. He reached out, and hissed with the flow of sweet power. “Tastes like coconut and metal,” he hissed, through grit teeth.

 

“You know, that’s exactly what I said,” Tony remarked, then went silent in awe as the god’s bright green eyes snapped open again, pupils pure blue-white for several seconds, seeming to stare straight through him.

 

Then Loki gasped sharply and pulled his hand away, collapsing a bit further, kept upright at all only by Nightcrawler’s grip about his shoulders and Tony reaching out to also hold him up by one upper arm, combined.

 

“Loki?” Kurt asked, sounding worried.

 

The god raised a hand, all fingers curled down save for his fully upright index finger, indicating that he just needed a moment. Indeed, after several seconds, he lifted his head with a sharp inhalation, and blinked away the odd lights in his eyes. He fixed his stare on the reactor for a moment, then on Tony’s face. “Yes, that was enough converted power to combat the poison, thank you. It’s good to learn that you do live up to your genius reputation, Mr. Stark,” he rasped. “I’m quite impressed.”

 

“Me too. Sometime, you’ll have to explain to me how your changing into a dragon and back again doesn’t violate the law of conservation of mass.” He helped the blue-furred mutant drag Loki back to his feet properly, and into a more upright overall posture from his hunched-over prior collapse.

 

Grinning at him tiredly, the god allowed Nightcrawler to give up the struggle of lifting someone with the physical density of a Jotunn, and allowed one of his arms to be pulled across the mechanical shoulders of Iron Man’s armor. “I look forward to working with you further, Mr. Stark.”

 

“Tony. Call me Tony.”

 

“Tony, then.”

 

“Much better.”

 

“You like the sound of your own name, as I recall. And the sight of it.”

 

“Well, I’m a bit possessive, yeah.”

 

“I don’t think I can teleport your armor,” Kurt said, sincerely apologetic.

 

“The jet is still flight-worthy, and someone has to fly it in,” Tony said.

 

“I’m not currently safe for you to teleport,” Loki added. “You have enough trouble with me in any case, without others in addition.” He gestured toward the Avengers, as Bruce approached them all, looking very grateful for the Hulk-proof trousers Tony had designed for him, which kept his modesty preserved as he rejoined his teammates.

 

“I’ll be flying you home then?” Tony mused.

 

“Back to their base, yes,” the trickster corrected quietly, not lifting his head enough to notice how Nightcrawler visibly drooped slightly at the statement, and how Ororo’s brow furrowed a little.

 

If they hadn’t been sure already, the Avengers then concluded with finality that the god of lies’ plans didn’t include sticking around, once the threat of the Chitauri was gone and he had recuperated fully from the harm they had inflicted upon him.

 

~~

 

Loki let himself be taken to the plane and placed in the co-pilot’s seat, and even buckled in. He dozed, a bit too drained to pay full attention to the rest of the Avengers, and the X-men, as Kurt took the others ahead of them to the Mansion. He did wake up when Tony returned, armor temporarily shed, and occupied the main pilot’s seat, prepping the jet for its return to the air.

 

“They’ll miss you, you know,” he said lightly.

 

The trickster shook his head. “I’m merely a guest.”

 

“How many times have you saved any of their lives so far?”

 

That, Loki didn’t really want to answer.

 

Tony let it go, starting up the jet’s engines and getting them back into the air. They didn’t have too much of a ways left to go. He then proceeded to only last about five minutes before asking, “Do you just not actually _like them_ as much as they like you?”

 

Loki snorted. “I like them better than any cohorts I fought alongside in Asgard, aside from Amora the Enchantress, who is also an exile these days.”

 

“So why do I get the feeling you’re planning to take the first chance to leave here that might drop your way?”

 

With a cold sigh, the trickster explained: “I would remember them as they are, and hold them in my memory, rather than losing them within a mere few decades’ time. If I stayed, they would eventually break my heart, Stark. I am already more fond of them than is safe, and already it will break my own heart to leave them behind, but knowing myself as I do, I do not…” He hesitated, then turned his tone deliberately both softer and more poisonous: “I do not, take loss, very well.”

 

Tony grimaced a bit self-deprecatingly, at that. “Me neither.”

 

“I am a temporary fixture here only. To believe I could truly have more would be to set myself up for pain when I did lose them, one by one, to the ravages of time. I would watch helplessly, and that might well drive me mad,” Loki murmured.

 

Stunned a bit by both the forthright honesty, and the almost overwhelming bitterness of the god’s words, Tony couldn’t help but take a full minute or so to really chew that answer over, before formulating any response of his own to it. “I see.”

 

A snort. “Do you?”

 

“The reactor in my chest isn’t the first version. The first one, I had to make out of bomb scraps in a cave, so I could move around without carrying a car battery bolted to the metal in my chest,” Tony recounted, in a voice that sounded almost clinically distant. He glanced at the god and then quickly away again, seeing the rapt and openy dubious expression on Loki’s face.

 

The inventor continued, “The doctor who saved me was named Yinsen. He helped me build my first suit of armor to escape the Ten Rings, who had kept me after realizing who I was when they were originally sent out to kill me. They wanted me to build weapons for them.” He cleared his throat. “Yinsen said he had a family: a wife and daughters. I wanted to get him out, and bring him back to them, but he got himself killed instead. He’d lied; his family was dead and he’d helped me, and encouraged me, because I could get the revenge against the Ten Rings that he wanted.”

 

A long pause followed.

 

“I still miss him,” the inventor added softly.

 

Loki stared at him for several long moments, then sharply looked away, eyes falling shut. He could read far too much in the mad mortal genius’ expression that he was more accustomed to seeing in the mirror.

 

He didn’t need another reason to be reluctant to leave Midgard. Absolutely not.


	2. Chapter 2

Loki passed out cold in the medical wing for most of the duration of the first day of the Avengers’ presence in the Mansion.

 

Tony realized quickly that most of the others in the mansion seemed much more boring, without Loki around, but he had a feeling that was this––fascinated sort of infatuation business, which he should really find a way to get rid of before it got any further out of hand. He had already had an emotional heart-to-heart with the god over Afghanistan, and the number of people he’d even considered talking to about Yinsen could be counted on one hand. Clearly, he was losing his mind.

 

Maybe gods gave off strange pheromones? But if they were really so biologically different from humans, why would those even effect humans? Was Loki even technically compatible with humans in a sexual sense?

 

That thought caused a flood of vivid mental images.

 

“Mr. Stark, please stop projecting so loudly,” Dr. Grey said. “I don’t know what exactly you’re projecting, because I’m making an effort not to look, but the fact it’s loud and seems to be desire- and arousal-related, makes me not _want_ to know.”

 

The other Avengers all shot him disapproving looks.

 

Tony grinned shamelessly, but banished that line of thought altogether. “Sorry. Got to thinking, is all.”

 

“No,” Natasha said sharply.

 

“I refuse, point-blank, to stop thinking,” the inventor countered.

 

“Stark, please don’t make this a potential diplomatic hurdle, is what I think she was suggesting,” Steve sighed.

 

“ _Oh_ ,” Emma said suddenly, looking very interestedly in Stark’s direction.

 

Tony hated nosy telepaths. He really did. He glared at her. “Get out.”

 

“Actually, you’re warded against me,” she said. “Also I only know one person capable of that, and notably the other Avengers aren’t quite so affected; although your ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. members have clearly been trained to keep out the likes of us, regardless. That does, however, make it clear who your teammates assume you were thinking about.”

 

“Please stop, Emma dear,” Erik sighed.

 

The inventor blinked. “Uh... what?”

 

“You’re warded,” said the quietest end of the table, at which Wanda Maximoff sat. “While on the flight here, Loki built a simplified version of some of his own shields, and applied them to you. It keeps out psychics, and makes you difficult for people like Emma to quite tap into.” She smiled at him, openly amused. “He must like you.”

 

“She is our resident expert in Loki-based studies,” Pietro said. “He’s taken her on as an apprentice, magic-wise.”

 

“You’re capable of magic?” Steve inquired lightly.

 

The witch nodded. “I am. I’ve excelled considerably, under Loki’s tutelage, and he’s a very good friend.”

 

Natasha and Bruce both noted something difficult to read in Erik’s expression, at that, but he looked them both in the eye sharply, catching their stares, and looked immediately masked again. Bruce glanced at Natasha, who mouthed, _possible family connection_ , just out of the line of sight of Erik himself.

 

She had done plenty of her research on Magneto, and her cold stare let him know it, when she next met his eyes.

 

Erik stared back, clearly unintimidated, except for how the comm device in the spy’s ear hummed oddly for a moment, before suddenly stopping as soon as Erik blinked. Natasha’s eyes narrowed a little further, but she said nothing aloud, and nor did he. The others were aware of some unspoken exchange, but tried to ignore it.

 

“The twins found him where he crashed to earth in the middle of the woods some distance south of here,” Emma informed them. “They are the ones to whom he is most loyal, as a result; although I suspect he’s more fond of some of the junior X-men than he would ever admit to the rest of us.”

 

“But you don’t trust him, Dr. Grey?” Natasha asked suddenly.

 

The telepath appeared a bit startled. So did a few of the others. “I never said so.”

 

“No, you did not, but you don’t trust him,” the spy repeated. “Why?”

 

Jean swallowed tightly. “I... he makes me very uneasy. That is all.”

 

“How so?” Scott asked, suddenly concerned. “You’ve never said so before.”

 

Bruce and Tony exchanged curious glances, at that.

 

“It’s––not a very rational feeling. I can tell that he’s safe for the rest of you to trust, but I feel as though, when he looks at me, he sees something I don’t want him to. That’s all,” she said quietly. “I don’t know how else to explain it, but I would really rather not think on it. His mind is... his mind is very complex, and I don’t wish to make any attempts to navigate it.”

 

“You should have told us immediately,” Mystique said sharply. “Your intuition-”

 

“My intuition is compromised,” Jean snapped sharply. “I am dealing with it as best I can without the Professor, but please don’t ask about this further.”

 

“Jean.”

 

“Not now, Scott,” she insisted. “Later. Okay?”

 

Reluctantly, her fiancé nodded his assent.

 

The inventor looked right at Erik, whose dossier he’d read through in the past. He knew that Erik had known Jean longer than anyone else at the table, and he saw a hint of uneasiness in the older man’s eyes. The when the former terrorist leader met his stare, Tony held it evenly. They managed to silently communicate both mutual concern on the same level, and that none of the others needed to know about it. Then they looked back at Jean, who stared down at the table with her mouth a thin line.

 

“Loki told us about where they’re keeping Professor Xavier,” Steve said. “From the sound of it, we’ll need to give it our all, and plan everything in detail before we go anywhere near that Chitauri base. He also said it’s unusually large and complex?”

 

“Three armada ships combined their resources,” Erik said. “They are also spawning more foot-soldiers within the place. It is one of only three places on Earth they have a powerful enough stronghold to do so, and as such is one of their top three most secure compounds. We should discuss it at length, certainly, but Loki knows the ways of the Chitauri best, and is so far the only one amongst us able to read and decipher their maps and other stolen information-”

 

“I can do that,” Tony said sharply. “Show me what you’ve got, and I can probably build a few things that’ll let your computer systems do similarly, for some of the stuff you can usually nick from the Chitauri that’s of any use.”

 

“Then yes,” Scott said firmly. “Let’s start there. We’ll get you to Hank.”

 

~~

 

By the time Loki was again conscious and fully functional half a day later, he had consumed a vast amount of food even by the standards of X-men with calorie-fueled powers. Thus refeuled, he rejoined Dr. Hank McCoy in the laboratory wing underneath the Mansion. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised to find Tony Stark and Dr. Bruce Banner down there already, as well, but he was.

 

“Hey!” Tony called, the first of the three scientists to spot him. “Good to see you awake. Come here and explain this insanity you call magic.”

 

If Loki’s heart beat a little faster and he couldn’t seem to pay a non-conspicuous degree of particular attention to Tony Stark, well––it wasn’t like it really meant anything.

 

He was just… interesting.

 

And far, far too tempting to covet without endangering himself. He would just continue staring at… what he was determined ( _oh Norns bless Midgard for his inability to keep his tongue in his mouth so often when he’s thinking NO STOP_ ) not to covet.

 

~~

 

Dr. Bruce Banner was nothing if not perceptive.

 

The same could be said of Dr. Hank McCoy.

 

It took the pair of them precisely four seconds to simultaneously conclude that they had just become third and fourth wheels to a pair of lunatics who couldn’t decide if they wanted to kill one another or fuck against the nearest wall. Bruce could tell by the particularly flirtatious-yet-challenging tone of Tony’s voice. Hank could tell based on the predatory-yet-fascinated way Loki prowled toward the mad inventor––distinctly more intense than any prior casual flirtations from the god of lies in the mansion thusfar.

 

It made both of the less-sexually-aroused scientists present more exasperated than uncomfortable; however, upon seeing their own feelings echoed in one another’s expressions, the pair of them simultaneously realized that they had, at last, found a true ally.

 

 _What purpose could such an alliance serve, though?_ inquired the quirk of Bruce’s eyebrows and the bemused twist of his lips.

 

Hank’s smirk became quite evil, then, and he knew the other doctor would understand its implication: We _troll the living hell out of the two biggest trolls in this mansion whilst they can neither of them do anything about it._

 

Bruce’s eyes widened a little, then narrowed into slivers of wicked mirth, with perhaps the faintest flecks of green in his irises just for a moment. _Oh I see. Lead on._

 

~~

 

There then ensued the most frustrated two hours of Tony Stark’s career in foiling attempts others might make to cockblock him. Bruce, he had counted on. Dr. McCoy, he certainly had not.

 

In retrospect, he supposed, a genius who survived in a house full of hormonally charged and angst-heavy teenagers with rejection complexes, the Wolverine, and women quite as searingly hot as Ororo Munroe and Dr. Jean Grey, was probably the unofficial World Champion of the art of cockblocking.

 

Every attempt at innuendo was almost instantly defused. Hank had a true talent for positioning diagrams between Loki and the mad inventor at every possible opportunity, sometimes going so far as to do so whilst hanging from the ceiling unexpectedly on a few occasions.

 

Loki, in turn, seemed thoroughly amused by the whole performance between the two mad inventors; and yet he didn’t seem inclined to dissuade Dr. McCoy’s antics in the very least. If Tony weren’t quite so stubborn, and the trickster hadn’t otherwise regarded him consistently with apparent fascinated intrigue, then he might’ve felt a bit rejected. Loki was clearly unable to ignore him, and it wasn’t out of annoyance, or Tony would have probably been casually wounded by now, and not metaphorically.

 

Given the god of lies’ reputation in mythology, Tony was a bit perplexed by the apparent game of hard-to-get.

 

Until Bruce unexpectedly advanced a level in cockblocking under Hank’s tutelage. “Careful, Loki,” he chided almost-playfully, but with an edge of more wickedly sincere warning, at one of the trickster’s cut-too-close jibes toward the Hulk. “You’re wearing matador colors around the likes of me.”

 

“Perhaps I might enjoy being an object of your provocation, Bruce darling,” Loki returned, with a casually leering smile.

 

Tony stiffened. He’d uttered over a dozen more innuendo-inclined witticisms within the past half-hour and gotten no such riposte. The degree to which the signals he was getting seemed to be mixed caused him to legitimately hesitate, and wonder if perhaps his advances weren’t actually welcome.

 

It stung more than he wanted to admit, and he felt something even more deeply uncomfortable: embarrassement. He’d been throwing himself at someone who used flirting as a deflective mechanism, not an encouragement.

 

_Right?_

 

Loki’s voice was suddenly very close to his ear, “Do please let me know if I’m in any actual danger with him. I’ve had too many other recent spinal injuries to provoke his other half.” His voice was a low, rather intimate rumble: self-deprecating and fond.

 

And it sent little shivers of pleasure down Tony’s whole spine. There was a hand on his hip, too. The god was really quite close to him and… was Hank scowling?

 

 _Damn. Smooth operator indeed, Silver-tongue_ , the inventor thought, leaning into Loki’s touch a little, and back toward the puff of breath he felt near his ear. “Anytime.”

 

The trickster’s smirk was pleased and those impossibly green eyes of his glittered with pure mischief, even as he pulled away, the fingers he’d rested on Tony’s hip trailed ghost-light up the back of Tony’s arm and across his shoulder-blades as Loki stepped around him. The god’s smirk remained uncowed even as Hank pointedly questioned him about a part of the current holographic diagram they all scrutinized, far enough away that the trickster had to take two steps away to see the details properly.

 

Tony’s skin tingled a bit in the trickter’s wake.

 

So maybe the hard-to-get game would be more than worth it, he supposed. It would just require more subtle approaches: not exactly Tony’s usual game.

 

The challenge offered, though, made his heartbeat quicken and his mouth water.

 

A chance to ensnare the likes of Loki was worth learning all sorts of new art forms for, Tony decided, then and there. He just had to figure out, first and foremost, what the god really wanted and/or craved enough to make him… linger like that.

 

From there he could maybe work out how to make that lingering last a bit longer, and whether Loki would even welcome him if he tried to reach out and touch, as well.

 

~~

 

After dinner that night, spent amongst the X-men and Avengers all, Tony asked Loki quietly, “Have a drink with me before you go?” before they parted ways in the hall.

 

The trickster appeared surprised and a bit sheepish. “Not tonight, I’m afraid. Wanda has claimed this evening for lessons.”

 

“After, then?”

 

Loki stepped a bit closer to him and touched his chin gently. “Her lessons are quite advanced, these days. We will require moonlight. Perhaps another time.”

 

Tony was left standing in the hall uncertain how to quite handle himself in the wake of that sort-of-not rejection, as the god strolled away.

 

“Did you just get turned down?” Natasha asked, sounding frankly stunned.

 

“For tonight?” he answered, sounding confused himself.

 

“Oh, Maximoff’s training, right. She mentioned it would be a late night,” Natasha mused. “He must be dedicated indeed, considering how much I’ve caught him staring at your ass, Stark.”

 

“Really?”

 

Her brow furrowed. “You’re actually surprised?”

 

“His more direct communications have been… well, mixed signals, frankly.”

 

The spy blinked at him. “You’re joking. He can’t keep his eyes off you whenever you’re talking. He’s like the only one in any given room who likes the sound of your voice almost as much as you do.”

 

Tony blinked a bit. “Then why-”

 

Natasha patted him on the shoulder. “You picked a crazy one, keep in mind,” she sighed, and strolled past him.

 

“But, I-”

 

“C’mon, Stark, we have work to do,” Hank chided him.

 

Tony muttered under his breath, “Fine, fine, I get the memo. I’ll drop it for tonight.”

 

“Finally,” Hank sighed, and caught his arm in a gentle tug back toward the labs. “You’re worse than a child pining for a new toy.”

 

“Hey!”

 

“We’re still not done incorporating you translation systems.”

 

“I know, I know, I’m letting you drag me, aren’t I?”

 

Hank scoffed at him, and kept dragging.

 

~~

 

The whole mansion shaking with unexpected exposions shortly after one in the morning had not been part of the magic-practicing plans, but it turned out to be a very good thing that Loki and their resident Scarlet Witch were already out there with weapons handy, when a squadron of just over a dozen Chitauri appeared by means of a teleportation portal, led by a blonde woman draped in chains and fury. Her eyes glowed an unseeing blue-black, and her magic crackled golden as wolf’s-eyes under bright sun.

 

“Amora,” Loki had whispered. “I am so sorry.”

 

“You know her?” Wanda checked.

 

“I plan to keep her alive if possible. Retreat to the mansion immediately, prepare people to potentially evacuate if this fight gets any closer to the front doors.”

 

The witch saw the deathly somber look in his eyes, and knew she would not live long enough for her lingering to matter, if she disobeyed. He impressed that feeling through the slight bond she had kept in place with him, since their arrival in the mansion, and so she turned, and she ran.

 

“And that,” Wanda said, “was what had happened right before that explosion.”

 

Needless to say, the teams of superheros there present advanced immediately.

 

_~~_

 

They found eight chitauri corpses’ worth of body parts where Wanda had left Loki near the gate. A section of the stone-and-wrought-iron wall that circled the mansion had been destroyed apparently by someone being propelled violently out through it, based on how the rubble had scattered.

 

Beyond it, several trees were part of a very concentrated are of conflagration in the nearby woods. There were sounds of horrible Chitauri chittering and screams, and another Chitauri torso was flung, also on fire, out of the heart of the disaster and towards the feet of the advancing heroes.

 

“It looks like Loki’s handling it well so far?” Steve suggested.

 

“Actually, the fire is a bad sign. He doesn’t usually resort to it,” Wolverine said over their shared comm channel. “He usually sticks to ice: less environmental evidence left behind other than water-damage that seems inexplicable.”

 

Tony landed a bit ahead of them, at the edges of the flames. Pietro appeared behind him shortly after and then further back-stepped.

 

“Wow, toasty. Someone really pissed him off this time,” the speedster said, sounding legitimately worried.

 

Tony turned to look at him. “Yeah, your resistence to forces like friction notwithstanding, Greased Lighting, you might want to sit this one out, kid.”

 

Pietro shook his head. “I can move fast enough not to get burnt, and I can gather better recon than most of your scans in a shorter time.” To prove his point, he reappeared at Tony’s left. “The Chitauri are all thoroughly in pieces and he’s focusing on trying to subdue the lady whose magic they seemed to use in order to get in here. She’s slightly psychic, though, and his head sort of leaks like a wound on the Astral Plane according to Jean, so he’s not as resistent to some of her powers as I think he’s used to being. I can’t distract her without putting myself at risk of getting hit with something I can’t recover from. Go shoot at her, they’re about half a mile that way.” He pointed norteast of the heart of  the blaze.

 

The inventor blinked at him, uncomfortable with how one mutant had beat all of JARVIS’ systems to assessing a battle-field, but grateful for the data nevertheless. “Right. Thanks.” His boot-repulsors promptly aimed him in that direction, as the speedster met with the others to plot an approach while Tony played heavily-armored distraction, with psychic-buffers Jean and Emma had confirmed the limits of earlier in the afternoon, in addition to whatever protections they insisted Loki had put on him.

 

That should do it, right?

 

He was hit in the face with a blast of sunshine-gold magic that hurled him through a tree and vaguely turned the whole world technicolor, leaving him dazed for just a moment, but he apparently distracted the Enchantress long enough for Loki to slip in close and knock her out with a violent, but very precise, application of the hilt of his dagger to the back of her skull.

 

She dropped, and the trickster caught her, his expression cracking open with acute worry, suddenly; although he did not hesitate to apply a spell to keep her under, before Amora's healing could reawaken her.

 

“She’s under Thanos’ control,” Loki explained, his voice so full of rage it didn’t tremble with it so much as reverberate with the beginnings of a rumbling growl he couldn’t fully suppress, though it was also a distinctly alien cadence, like his vocal chords momentarily took on a distinctly less human-like shape, just briefly, until he visibly shook off some of his ire enough to refocus his self-control, with a shake of his head and a resettling of his expression into a more clinical, less cracked, mask. “She will need to be heavily restrained, and a number of precautions taken.”

 

“Who is she?” Tony asked, once he managed to pull himself upright and flip up his mask. The others were close behind him, audibly confirming that the brawl was over, some of them retreating to keep out of the way of those with medical training, and to help Hank prepare the medical wing for a potentially volatile new patient.

 

“An old friend, and these days a fellow exile: Amora the Enchantress,” he said, a tragic excuse for a smile tugging at his lips briefly. “Were she in better shape, I have no doubt that she would laugh and ask what took me so long to catch up with her in that status, just as loudly as I would ask her how it took her so long to find me again this time.” He cradled her close, picking her up bridal-style, though she looked more like a sleeping child in his embrace than a lover.

 

Tony realized he was seeing precisely how deeply Loki valued those he truly cared about, and started to wonder what it might take to earn that sort of devotion from the god of lies. He felt a bit strangely childish for just a moment, then, but dismissed it by habitually focusing on potential plans of action.

 

Not that he didn’t now feel a bit more ridiculous for doing so. From the looks of things, he would be lucky to get a night of hedonistic abandon or two at most from the god of lies, and he’d known that from the start. That was always the case with him, before and after Pepper. Why would it have changed now, just because a gorgeous alien who also happened to be a fallen god might happen to stare at his ass frequently?

 

Right. Super. Expectations lowered.

 

Now if only he could get rid of the searing, burning hungry want in the middle of his chest right now, that would be perfect.

 

“You okay?” Tony asked gently.

 

“Probably never again, frankly, but I make do,” Loki responded, with as much precision and art as any other witticism, but his smile was a much bleaker thing this time, and his eyes wouldn’t meet the inventor’s as he said it. There was no mischievous grin this time, no fierce laughter: just cold certainty.

 

The inventor shivered, and followed him when Loki began walking back to the mansion. He didn’t offer to take his burden there more quickly. He knew the offer wouldn’t be welcome, same as Pietro also surmised once he abruptly appeared.

 

“Woah. Pretty, but clearly destructive, she is. Friend of yours, then?” the speedster greeted.

 

“One of my closest and oldest, yes,” Loki responded.

 

Pietro’s face fell. “Oh _shit_.”

 

The trickster nodded, and kept walking.

 

With an air of nervously bouncy impatience for only a few irritated moments before resignation set in, the speedster fell in step with them, clearly dissatisfied with the slow pace, but not about to say a word about it aloud. “Wanda suggested it was serious, but uhm…”

 

“Amora had been infatuated with my brother for a very long time, but within the past century had lost interest in those self-destructive pursuits. I am now deeply concerned about the absence of her lover and partner-in-crime Skurge, for he is one of the most deeply loyal beings in all existence, and he is fully devoted to her.”

 

Pietro and Tony exchanged uncomfortable glances. From that glance, the inventor inferred that this was genuinely more than Loki ever usually shared, in the personal information department, with him either.

 

Asked the speedster, “You think the Chitauri still have him?”

 

“And I fear deeply what they might make of Skurge the Executioner’s genetic potential, amidst their ranks,” Loki intoned gravely.

 

“He’s a bit of a badass then?” Tony prompted.

 

The trickster shot him a droll look.

 

“Yeah, I figured, with a title like that,” the inventor said, taking that as agreement.

 

“Quite,” Loki said.

 

Wanda was the first to join them, breathing hard as she nearly ran past their relatively sedate procession, before she quite skidded to a halt. “What the Hell, Loki?”

 

“She’s an old friend,” Pietro said quickly. “And apparently her soulmate is missing, and he’s a big scary guy we don’t want in the Chitauri gene pool.”

 

Tony marveled a bit at how quickly the twins had adapted to preventing the god from having to repeat himself when it came to uncomfortable messages. It was clearly almost reflexive between them. He asked lightly, “So I take it mere cognitive recallibration like you knocked her out with won’t free her from control? We noticed there are various degrees of ‘depth’ the control can reach. We lost a good man, Dr. Erik Selvig, finding that out.”

 

Loki nodded, glancing down at Amora’s face rather than watch Wanda’s expression quickly sober into shock, and then mild horror. “She is under as far as I was, and I would not inflict upon her the means by which I escaped, if avoidable, but she is also a walking hazard to others with psychic gifts of any kind, unless they are sufficiently forewarned and fore-armed against the insidious nature of Thanos’ control, as are the psychic residents of this household… except for Rogue.”

 

“Is she at that great of a risk?” Pietro asked.

 

“So long as she keeps out of the mansion’s lower levels? No. Her gift is mild, and restricted to tactile stimuli unless she borrows the abilities of anyone else in the mansion anytime soon,” Loki estimated.

 

“Good,” Wanda said, now also keeping pace with them. Over her communicator, she told the others, “We have a subdued subject under enemy control. Containment procedures, folks. Also, psychic wards to full, captains.”

 

“How great of a threat is she?” Emma inquired immediately.

 

Loki reluctantly activated his own communicator with a flicker of magic to avoid having to shift Amora’s position as he held her. “Minimal, so long as I have her subdued, but I do require sleep eventually, to recuperate from fighting with her so. She is, currently, stronger than I am. Her endurance was lower than usual, and she was quite disoriented, or I would not have been able to subdue her at all, but with time to rest and heal, she will only strengthen further.”

 

Wanda and Pietro appeared deeply disturbed by that announcement.

 

“That could be a problem, Loki,” Emma said. “We can’t contain even just you, with our current facilities.”

 

“I can spare some blood and bind her soul for a time, within a single room, for the duration of her recovery. She may one day even forgive me for such a horrible action, if we can rid her of Thanos’ grasp. She is an Asgardian exile, as well as I, and would owe me a great boon for that. She is also an older ally to me than any of the rest of you, Miss Frost, which you would do very well to keep in mind.”

 

Wanda and Pietro exchanged further surprised and bemused looks Tony couldn’t quite decipher, the twins knowing one another’s micro-expressions so well that he knew he was missing more than half of their unspoken conversation.

 

“Bring her down to the medical bay, then, Loki,” Bruce assured. “The facilities here, in combination with what Tony and I carry regularly in the jet, should do, if my calculations are right, which you can also confirm when you get here.”

 

“Thank you, Dr. Banner,” Loki said, with more sincere gratitude than usual.

 

That unsettled Wanda a little more than she wanted to admit.

 

~~

 

Once Amora was physically stabilized, Loki allowed Emma and Jean to provide him the necessary armored support and stabilizing power-structures, on the astral plane, to allow him to dream-walk non-catastrphically for the first occasion since his great long fall.

 

The result kept all three parties, and Amora, in a trance until late afternoon, at which point Emma floated an unconscious Loki out, looking exasperated, but also sort of conflicted, like she couldn’t decide whether to admit respect for him or not yet. She delivered him to his quarters, and he emerged again only once the smells of food from a large dinner lured him back to consciousness.

 

“Had a feeling,” Wanda greeted. “Sit.” She gestured at the seat she had saved next to her, for him.

 

Tony Stark just happened to occupy the seat on Loki’s other side, once he sat down, that might have been planned ahead of time by the inventor. He might one day admit to it, but he would feel a bit embarrassed doing so until he had at least gotten a hand down Loki’s pants.

 

“My head is killing me,” the trickster muttered. He smiled helplessly, however, when Wanda filled his plate with pasta and vegetables before he could even ask.

 

Tony smiled a bit, too, because her mothering while looking at him like she had grown resigned with his ridiculousness was genuinely adorable. “Good to see you upright again, though. It was a bit eerie seeing Frost float your unconscious body up the stairs, let me tell you. I prefer you more animated, despite your cute sleep-face.”

 

“He had his mouth open and was snoring a little,” Wanda pointed out, amused.

 

Loki cleared his throat, glaring at her playfully. “You, m’lady, drool in your sleep.”

 

She scowled at him. “I don’t.”

 

“You do, sometimes, sis,” Pietro corrected flatly.

 

“Traitor,” she hissed.

 

“Seriously? It’s not that big of a secret. You fell asleep at that last team meeting.”

 

“Oh my god, Pietro!”

 

“Nice save,” Tony congratulated the trickster, watching the twins lose track of the rest of the table around them, as they grew more caught up in their own bickering.

 

“Wish I could say the same of you, oh graceful armored projectile,” Loki teased, “but thank you regardless. It needed to be done.”

 

“I get the job done, but yeah, the machinery tends to be more elegant than I myself otherwise am,” Tony admitted freely, with a winning smirk. “Maybe you could give me lessons.”

 

“He’s not a miracle-worker,” Natasha remarked.

 

The inventor had known letting her sit beside him for this venture had been a calculated risk, and was accordingly prepared for the fallout. “Well, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck…” He looked Loki up and down with pointed appreciation. “Or, in this case, a god.”

 

“Of lies,” Steve pointed out, warningly. _Stop flirting, Tony, or so help me_ , might have been implied by his tone.

 

“And silver-tongued, let’s not forget,” Rogue added, happy to pimp her friend out just to make Loki frown at her for a second. The pair of them being as shameless and perpetually furtive in maneuvering through situations as they were, tended to take unholy pleasure in the rare occasions they could genuinely meddle with one another’s plans, especially when none of the others had even begun to catch on to the game being played yet, in the least.

 

Loki now knew she was aware of his internal conflict on this whole matter, and he was very lucky so far that she hadn’t contributed it to the mansion’s local rumor-mill, given that she shared a room with Jubilation Lee. She had just let him know that he now owed her for it, too. He half-smirked at her, but the expression was somehow one of complete resentment.

 

Rogue grinned at him, clearly now basking in his owing her quite a favor for her loyal silence… at least, while it still lasted.

 

Remy was glancing between them like he could see them playing some sort of familiar game, but still didn’t understand exactly what had just happened, to the trickster’s incredible relief. He could only handle one of those crooked southern runaways at a time, in interpersonal warfare, not that he would ever dare admit it aloud, for secretly fearing that they might genuinely never cease teaming up.

 

Tony caught only that Rogue and Loki had an apparent in-joke, and the Cajun was irritated by it, and possibly just a bit jealous in a put-out sort of way (judging by his slight pout) given he seemed to be dating the lady. “What are you suggesting there, dear lady? I do declare, that sounds ever so perverse when you say it that way,” he mocked, taking on just enough of her accent to be annoying.

 

She only smiled a little wider at him. “Well, y’all are both perverts.”

 

“I did hear a story about a h-” Clint started.

 

Wolverine put a hand over his mouth quickly. “No. Never again.”

 

“Duly noted,” Natasha said, with  thoughtful nod. “You’ve got them very well-trained, Loki.”

 

“You want some advice for reeling in Mr. Stark?” Loki remarked casually.

 

Tony frowned at him. “Hey.”

 

“No, I think I’ll let you handle him. He’ll clearly enjoy it more,” she shot back.

 

“Well, I can’t actually disagree, there,” the inventor said immediately, suddenly already planning her a ‘you are my new favorite wing-man’ present as reward. _Maybe new stingers that adjust their charge’ strength based on input from her for how to change its modes smoothly between fighting-gestures and evasive tactics more comfortably for her_.

 

Loki’s pupils dilated visibly, and he cleared his throat.

 

“Again, he ain’t a miracle worker,” Rogue cut in, “but if anyone could get obedience out of a stubborn ass like you, Stark, it’d probably have to be a god with an ego almost as vast as your own.” She said it in purring tones that clearly weren’t actually aimed at Tony, given how they made color rise to other faces around the table. Tony counted the Drake kid, Remy, and even Jubilee; although the latter shot a hesitant glance toward the Wolverine, whose expression was… very focused, but almost suspiciously bland. Steve’s face was the color of a tomato, but that was clearly just embarrassment, this time.

 

Tony glanced up at the god of lies with one of his fiercest challenging smiles. “Maybe later.”

 

Loki exhaled very slowly, holding his stare. “You are a ridiculous creature, Stark.”

 

“Yeah, but you like it,” the inventor shot back, with a wink.

 

The trickster chuckled softly, but didn’t actually manage to find will to argue.

 

“How’d the Amora thing work out in the end, anyhow? Emma went straight to her rooms and is doubtlessly enjoying wine and being far from the rest of us right now, and Jean is still meditating to cope with her own side-effects,” Tony said. “We got the message that she’s safe to be around, but can’t help but notice she’s still unconscious.”

 

“She’s in a reparative stasis, of a sort. I was able to aid her in finding anchorage outside of Thanos’ distortions of her perception of reality. She will need… possibly up to a month or two. Possibly less. It is a lot of damage to inflict, all at once.”

 

A few people around the table shot him worried glances, at that, and what it implied about the state of the inside of Loki’s own head.

 

“She’s welcome here,” Scott said, “as your guest.”

 

“My thanks,” The god said, nodding toward him.

 

“We couldn’t have stopped her so fast without you,” Scott said simply. “It’s the least we can do. It’s not like we aren’t all some form of exile or another, around here.”

 

Loki smiled at him a bit helplessly. “I suppose not.”

 

Upon seeing that smile, Tony felt his chest do something funny and knew he was officially doomed, because that felt like his heart again. It hadn’t been that many days, so clearly this was a sign of madness, but the glitter of renewed mischief in the god’s eyes, the way his shoulders relaxed a little in time with the wry curve of his smile and his fingers moved across the edge of his water glass were all inexplicably compelling arguments in favor of throwing all hesitation to the four winds.

 

Tony wanted this one. This mad, hopelessly elegant, ridiculously loyal and reserved, hellishly powerful and dangerous, brilliant mess was so gorgeous and puzzling and fascinating that he didn’t foresee letting him slip away ever sounding like a good idea. And he was very quietly horrified by that realization just for a moment.

 

Usually it took him longer to reach that conclusion––it had taken far too long with Pepper precisely because of how incredibly vital she became to his life very quickly after appearing there, and how horrifying the idea of ever losing her in that position in his life had been, but this was the opposite. Tony wanted to need this man, and the thought alone should’ve struck him as insane, but he was nevertheless more and more compelled to pursue in spite of that.

 

Even if maybe he was getting ridiculously lured in more by every glimpse under the god’s cracked armor he got, just from watching him try not to leave too much of his heart in his expression interacting with the X-men who had become so fond of keeping him around that...

 

That snapped into a whole other realization, for Tony. The reason Loki’s actions all savored as somehow familiar to him, even when the signals he was getting from the god of lies seemed conflicted.

 

Just like when Pepper had first realized Tony knew how much more he wanted from her, and had nearly panicked in the middle of a party, in fact.

 

That might just mean, by extension, that he was either pointedly excluding Tony from casual flirtation because he didn’t want Tony getting any ideas, or because he was petrified of getting involved with anyone mortal sexually on top of his current array of emotional melodrama where the X-men were concerned.

 

Which brought him back to square one of being entirley uncertain. _Dammit._

 

 _Why does this keep happening?_ he asked loudly in his own brain, but as ever, in his trying to get a proper read on this too-attractive trickster, he couldn’t find any other ways to avoid potentially getting stabbed if he was incorrect. Again. _Dammit!_

 

~~

 

“You could actually turn him down and save yourself a lot of trouble,” Natasha pointed out, saying it into the god’s ear before he could stand. He knew she was aware of his watching Tony Stark exit.

 

He really couldn’t help himself. Tony’s jeans were perfectly fitted that evening, and after the flirtation during dinner, he was watching the man’s hips as well, and imagining how they might look writhing under him, perhaps undulating in time with the motions of being fucked. Because, as Rogue has all-too-correctly pointed out, the silver-tongued god of lies did not exactly have the well-earned tongue-related monicker with such irremovable staying power because he demurely kept it in his own mouth when he desired to sample someone else’s, and knew them to be willing and interested.

 

Centuries of habit taxed his self-control to such and extent he was beginning to feel ridiculous for holding out any hope that he would actually be able to resist such a too-damnded-dangerously-appealing indulgence as the likes of Tony Stark. Thus, the Black Widow’s sudden words in his ear cutting off that train off thought did make him twitch, a bit too-tellingly, and immediately donned an expression of deep annoyance that he knew would communicate to the spy just how foolish and resentful he felt about being caught in that particular petty snare, well-executed as her technique had been. “This is always the trouble with spies, I’ve noticed. Your skill-sets overlap with mine just enough to be annoying.”

 

“Oh trust me, I’m not the only one aware.”

 

At that, Loki swore in a language the spy didn’t recognize.

 

“Did you really think you weren’t obvious?”

 

“I’ve been severely distracted, at… such times.”

 

“Yes, that would usually be the obvious part, for you, which does seem to be why everyone in the house who likes you enough to bother being interested in your having a healthy sex life worked this out before any Avenger other than myself. Pretty much as soon as you started making eyes at him like you did tonight, and all.”

 

“I’m the god of lies, but there are limits,” he sighed, in coldly resigned tones. “You’ve lived as long as your flash-frozen Captain without nearly so much memory loss. I’m certain you understand practical hesitation.”

 

“Tony Stark has few limitations where his practicality is concerned. He’ll find a way or he’ll make one, when it comes to pursuing what he wants,” she added. “This is friendly warning that if you can’t actually tell him ‘no’ then resistence is going to be futile for you, at this rate, and there’s already enough hormonally-charged angst in this house to fuel decades’ worth of soap operas. I have a team to run, and yeah, it’s trouble keeping track of Stark, but he’s worth the trouble, to us, and he’s interested enough that you too are now a similarly vital factor.”

 

“Is this your way of ‘pimping him out’ as Rogue might put it?”

 

She stepped around to stand in front of him. “My world is being taken over, and you’re effectively making yourself miserable for fear of a future none of us may even live to see. It’s annoying, and you should stop it.” She patted him on the cheek, and started to saunter out.

 

“We could wager on it.”

 

She paused, and turned around again. “I’m listening.”

 

“I can accept that I’m effectively doomed here, but I’m also recovering from some psychologically traumatic events such that I… Well, I’m genuinely not in a state to take these risks… yet.” He cleared his throat, shooting her a pointed look, his head tilted slightly down as though his forehead were suddenly all too heavy. His furrowed brow and the fine creases around his eyes tightened a little, suggesting pain. “But I could use added incentive to resist, for the time being, and I know how to subvert my own destructive impulses, these days.”

 

“So a bet on how long you can resist?” she suggested.

 

He inclined his head towards her. “More a sort of boon in promise for your continued silence,” he offered.

 

Natasha couldn’t help but find her interest piqued.

 

They both turned toward the door, unsurprised to find Logan standing there with an unlit cigar in his mouth.

 

“You don’t have money,” the Wolverine said flatly.

 

“I’m an excellent facilitator,” Loki offered. “Anyone bothering you that you aren’t allowed to violently eviscerate, for instance?”

At that, the super-healer looked very thoughtful. “Hmm.”

 

“Install similar alien tech upgrades to our Quinjet to the ones you put in their Blackbird. I like them,” Natasha said.

 

The trickster nodded. “Acceptable.”

 

“Lebeau,” Logan said.

 

The spy’s eyebrows raised. “Really? A hit?”

 

“Not a hit,” Loki assured her, already understanding. “I’m just surprised your motive this time isn’t actually jealousy.” _Well, not purely_ , he didn’t add. He wanted, after all, to keep his face intact tonight.

 

“She and I go way back, and he’s slept around a couple times on her, to the great offense of my olfactory, let’s say. Time for him to go, but I haven’t been able to manage it, because I respect and fear Rogue as she properly deserves, and all.

 

“A sensible survival policy for anyone, I’ve noticed, yes,” the god agreed.

 

Natasha nodded. “She’s talented.”

 

“Yeah, she’s a bit too sharp for any of my attempts to advise her to result in anything but me getting yelled at for being over-protective, but I’m resigned to that.”

 

“Have you?” the spy asked, her tone cold and flat.

 

“If it’s my interference she blames for their break-up, the sorry bastard will know he has more of a chance she’ll forgive him in favor of being pissed off at me, and I wouldn’t blame her. She’s tried to talk me out of… a lot of things I should’ve listened on.” The old super-healer shrugged and reached over to tap his cigar ash into a nearby ashtray with an expression of annoyance at his own civility.

 

Natasha blinked a bit, staring a bit in surprise. “For a guy who says he isn’t great at delicacy, you’ve got a good read on things.”

 

“Decades of experience hammered into my skull had to be good for something, whether I remember most of it clearly or not.”

 

“I know the feeling,” she concurred with impersonal, professionally appreciation. “It would genuinely be easier with senses like yours, too. I can see that.”

 

He chuckled a bit, shooting her a look caught between appreciation and a level of awareness that came from knowing all too well what she was capable of, too.

 

The trickster inclined his head toward Logan. “It will take time to arrange that anyway, yes. Since this is a foregone conclusion, I see no reason I can’t begin working towards that over the next couple of weeks, or so.”

 

“I knew we kept you ‘round for more than your absurd powers,” Logan muttered, with a grin. “That’s why you should do as the lady says and fucking stick around, you jackass. They’re worth more risks than you think, and you keep Emma on her toes better than the rest of ‘em. It’s entertaining as hell.” He then closed the door behind him.

 

Loki let his head loll back with an exasperated noise. “I can escape none of them, can I?”

 

“You’re ensnared hopelessly,” the Black Widow informed him gently, with an evil grin. “Same as the rest of us.”

 

The trickster began swearing extensively, as she, too, left; although she paused at the door and added, “Since you’ve already accepted your fate? Stop avoiding the lab. You have work to do.”

 

“Yes, mistress.”

 

“You wish. I’m easier to keep no-strings and you know it, but we both know that’s not what you want from me, or him.”

 

He chuckled self-effacingly as she snapped the door shut, then emitted a low groan of displeased anticipation, because there was no possible way this could possibly end painlessly. It could, in fact, only get more precarious from here.

And yet he would savor every glorious moment of that man’s time he could occupy a little more of. Time and attention. And probably a lot of licking every inch of his skin. At least bi-weekly if possible.

 

Loki scoffed at himself again, trying to halt that train of thought and failing miserably, because his mind’s eye was now occupied with plotting a number of potential routes and particular places he wanted to devote very specific forms of appreciation to, a lot. 

 

So clearly he was doomed and would probably not be able to sanely muster this wholly sensible fear much longer, because knowing just how enthusiastically the inventor would truly let him, was growing steadily more important-seeming, in comparison.

 

Especially because if he kept getting semi-hard at dinner around the man, a creature as observant as Tony Stark was bound to realize eventually that the god’s apparent resistance to flirting with him, was in fact to prevent himself from taking that particular fall.

 

Falling into Tony Stark’s life with intention to stay there as long as possible, he had been able to see from the moment they had first met and the inventor’s protectiveness of JARVIS had shown through so instantly and viciously at the same time that the AI’s entire existence had already successfully given Loki a measure of such intense intellectual attraction to Stark. It had been a perfect storm of realization that this one might not be willing to let him go, if he decided to hang on, in the wake of Loki’s own self-doubts concerning the Maximoff twins, and trying very hard not to plan to stay in their lives for… too much longer than was necessary to inflict himself upon their adoptive family of sorts in the form of the X-men and this school.

 

And it had shattered all of his resistance.

 

“Damn. Everything.” _Just how long have I been in free-fall this time?_ was, historically, never exactly an encouraging thought for Loki to have, but he couldn’t exactly declare it to be as unfamiliar as he truly, truly wished that he could.

 

_Even the god of lies has limits I say, and now it certainly does seem I’ve just found even more of them. I hate them. (Not as much as I should.) You, there, can shut up anytime now. (This can’t end well.)_

 

Strangely, this time, that particular voice sounded a lot less convincing than it had in a very, very long time. And Tony Stark was to blame for it.

 

And maybe that lunatic could actually help him turn that into a good thing.

 

The hope was thinner than Gleipnir, but about as strangely difficult to break, and if he denied it any longer, he apparently had somehow collected friends who would harrass him until he openly addressed his neuroses and outlined his limits for them.

 

Suddenly Loki realized why that hope was too damned strong. Clearly these optimistic damned heroes were feeding it like the life-force of all damned Yggdrasil, and for that he may never forgive them.

 

~~

 

Tony Stark was in very, very deep trouble.

 

He was, in fact, royally screwed. No, wait, that would suggest he was getting screwed at all, which would be preferable to his current state of frustration.

 

It was all Loki’s fault, for being so unfairly perfect and somehow never as within-reach as Tony was comfortable reaching out to fondle, despite how badly he wanted to fondle with impunity. Furthermore, he wanted the god to enjoy it, which was turning out to be trickier than Tony felt was honestly fair to him, at this point, but the god still wasn’t giving him enough encouragement for him to believe that the god’s lack of flirting back so far was anything but a sign of disinterest.

 

The prospect of potential outright rejection was seriously beginning to haunt his dreams a bit uncomfortably often, at this rate. He almost missed the other nightmares. They usually didn’t involve quite as much of his own brain further cock-blocking him when in his dreams, at fucking least, he should be allowed to enjoy the fantasy of being enthusiastically shoved up against a wall and rubbed against. Tony just wants the simple things in life, that way.

 

Except with Loki. Apparently Tony’s enthusiasm for complications there had now escalated to the point of being embarrassing.

 

Something had to be done.

 

He then slapped himself across his forehead with his own hand. _You are an idiot, a bit, for not calling your Rock sooner and you know it. She’s less likely to yell at you for wasting time than Rhodey since he’s still holding San Francisco._

 

So call her he did.

 

“Pepper, I’m going insane due to sexual frustration.”

 

“If this is an attempt at a booty call, I may actually fire you again, apocalypse be damned, Anthony Stark.”

 

“No! No. I just mean there is a very specific source of this sexual frustration, and he is a shameless flirt with everyone in this damned house other than me, Pep. Ever since his blonde BFF went comatose he’s been back in the lab being brilliant at me, but I want him even worse! I want more of him now!”

 

“Wow, been a while since you fixated on anyone male. I’m glad you too have finally recovered from our break-up enough and grown as a person enough to be interested in someone else so seriously again, I suppose, though.”

 

“I can say this is more severe fixation than I’ve felt towards another male in my life, actually, Pep, but I can only be so open about this for so long. You’d be amazed how hard it is to maintain an effectively secretive phone conversation in a joint like this, and I’ve only got a few minutes before an annoying super-healer notices the new dead-spot in his too-acute senses’ awareness and makes a change in his rounds stalking about the place to ruin all of my efforts.”

 

“You really that worried about him overhearing?”

 

“No, but it’s annoying to have him know my actual insecurities when I go through all the effort to get over my pride and admit to them, you know?”

 

She gave a small, surprised laugh, at that. “Who are you and what have you done with Tony Stark?”

 

“What?” he sounded annoyed.

 

“That feeling? That’s shame. You’re feeling shame right now.”

 

“Nonsense. I’m Tony Stark.”

 

She scoffed outright, at him, for that, but admitted, “Well, now that both of us are certain you want to tell me the real reason it took you so long to call me rather than blaming your tools like you do when you’re misdirecting from those insecurities?”

 

He sighed, but reluctantly admitted, “I also had to basically wait until Loki ran sufficiently out of steam that I could remind him he’s technically still in need of sleep to maintain his rate of recovery. Well, specifically I had to wait until I woke up from the sleep spell he put on me vindictively, which I guess was kind of fair since I hadn’t slept in over a day and a half either, and then the second time I tried it he actually listened, because I’m right… and also made it sound like I’d also be napping. Which might be part of this ugly-looking monstrosity I used to create a white-noise field for this includes a couple of more high-tech add-ons.”

 

“Wow, okay. You’re really serious about this. And apparently you’ve already escalated to training one another’s quirks into mutual functionality.”

 

“I’m seriously losing my mind here, Pep. Everyone, seriously everyone in this damned house is making bets on me. Natasha and Logan are the two most efficient bookies of all fucking time, I swear.”

 

“Is he actually clueless?”

 

“He is the opposite of clueless. I have had no idea pretty much this whole time whether he’s offended by my flirting with him and just ridiculously witty and maddeningly well-mannered, or if he actually maybe wants me to taste his mouth as much as I really, really want to.”

 

“No need to be quite that graphic.”

 

“I mean it, Pep, when I say I’m fixated, and also that I am going insane.”

 

“Well, arguably you’re always insane.”

 

“True, but I mean more urgently, all at once, and to the point more people who I am never comfortable admitting that I value the opinions of to their faces are laughing at me a lot less subtly. Nothing about this is okay.”

 

“Tony, has he actually made any efforts whatsoever to deter you?”

 

“Well, no, but-”

 

“Then keep trying. Maybe he’s not feeling very emotionally stable either.”

 

“I… did sort of, um... Well, I admit sometimes he looks at me and I keep remember completely fucking up that time I tried to dance with you and woo you a bit and completely dropped the ball, but since I can’t tell if he’s covering up discomfort, or trying not to do something he might regret.”

 

“Then it sounds like you haven’t heard a no, so he’s not trying to make you stop pursuing him, and if this is anyone you of all people are hung up on, I think he’s probably a smart enough cookie to know that if he actually stopped you, you’d never start again.”

 

“I… Pepper you are either brilliant or basically telling me to persist harrassing a guy until he finally gets fed up with it. I also want to sort of state that this guy may or may not be a super-powered con-artist par excellance, easily capable of making any violent death of mine look like an accident.”

 

“Is he the sort of guy to tolerate you when he genuinely thinks you’re being annoying?” she asked flatly.

 

“…Not even a little bit,” he said slowly. “You are correct about that, wow. I’m an idiot, holy shit.”

 

“Exactly, and I am very glad to hear that. Maybe you really can keep him, because that sounds like quality material I might even approve of.”

 

“Your approval would be heartening if I could get to any of the many places and positions I want to be in with him, Pep. But why can’t he just… encourage me even a little bit like this? It’s seriously-”

 

“Tony, you’re in the middle of a war-zone and have found someone so pretty and twisted in ways you can’t seem to resist, such that _you_ of all people already dedicated a lot of time to pursuing more-than-sex-with this person. Why are you surprised that signs of increasingly undying interest in an intimate relationship might legitimately come across as terrifying if he’s also interested too?”

 

“I… Pepper, this is why I love you forever.  How are you so gloriously sensible?”

 

“Because I have a slightly more satisfactory sex life these days. My current booty-call managed to visit last week.”

 

“Wow, that is… quite an image and doesn’t help my sexual frustration at all.”

 

“And the image of you begging to be fucked doesn’t help with the fact she won’t be out of the field again until we finish Xavier-related plans. Buck up, Iron Man. I know from personal experience how thoroughly your suits conceal your arousal no matter how flustered you get, after all. I’m sure he’ll escalate to finding that out the same ways I did someday if you’re both very lucky, and you are sufficiently well-behaved for him.”

 

“Sweet fucking… That is not fair, Pepper!”

 

“Good luck, Tony,” she sing-songed, and hung up.

 

Just in time for Logan to round the corner. “What did you even do to that toaster?”

 

“… To be fair it was actually in one of the labs for reasons no one would fess up to and was broken before I started?”

 

The Wolverine’s brow furrows indicated that he remained unimpressed, but he raised one heavy eyebrow in further questioning.

 

“...Collect call.”

 

“About what?”

 

“My sex life.”

 

“...Who are you, or more likely, who thought replacing you with a Live Model Decoy capable of considerate discrection was ever a good idea?”

 

“Ha-fucking-ha, jackass. I don’t actually enjoy broadcasting everything to you when I’m aware how hard you’re laughing at me over it.”

 

At that, the older man grinned. “Well, to be fair, you’re ridiculous.”

 

“Trust me, I know.”


	3. Chapter 3

Within those first two weeks of alliance between the the X-men, Emma Frost and her minions, the Brotherhood, and the Avengers, Loki and Tony spent so much together and feeding off one another’s inquiries and tangents like the oceas feeding a tropical storm, that eventually Bruce and even Hank felt just extraneous enough to the whole whirlwind of discoveries the pair of them set one another’s brains into, that they simply left the exhaustingly-dynamic duo to their own devices, unless either the mage or the engineer were needed for specific advice and some of Hank’s and Bruce’s own other projects.

 

Also Scott and Steve had quickly begun making semi-regular appearances insisting that they really should get some sleep eventually, and proceed to glare at them with disapproval until they cooperated, which was surprisingly often. Loki had discovered all-too-early on that Scott Summers’ true strongest super-power was in making people who disappointed him feel ashamed, which reminded Loki in bizarre turns of both his mother and Thor to such deeply uncomfortable degrees that he would never admit just how far he might actually let his pride stoop to avoid them.

 

No reason to inform Scott just how damned effective that attitude was. The slight grudgingly fond, yet exasperated expressions on Tony’s face when it was Captain Rogers displaying an only slightly closer to genuinely fed-up expression than the other Fearless Leader in their allied forces, suggested that the inventor knew that feeling as well, but the trickster tried not to dwell on that.

 

It made him think about things like how perfectly willing and able to play along Tony would probably be if Loki recommended testing whether or not the clockwork-like reminders from their exasperating leadership might not start becoming more hesitant if both more reserved and easily-embarrassed leaders were scared of walking in on the pair of them fucking like rabbits.

 

It was a thought he was finding all the more dangerously tempting as days went by. He was still hesitant to himself reach out. Whenever he did that, he had a nasty tendency to be a fool about it. Perhaps, for once, he needed to be pursued himself. He never had been, and particularly never with such art and care.

 

At least, that was what Rogue suggested, out of the blue, afternoon shortly after the trickster god had awoken from a Scott-demanded nap to cope with the recent series of long night patrols trying to keep key life-supporting infrastructure points like nuclear power-plants free of Chitauri.

 

Loki blinked further awake blearily at her. “Pardon?”

 

“You don’t strike me as somebody used to being chased for good reasons, but I think you need it.”

 

The trickster stared at her in deep confusion for a moment, then exhaled pure exasperation as he recalled briefly loaning her a bit of his own recuperative powers to allow them both to escape at speed despite being on-foot and armored on the last patrol. It had been such brief contact. “Your powers remain disconcerting.”

 

“Yeah, I got that too. Don’t worry about it. You actually are disconcerted more by what you do understand that what you don’t, and you’re not actually afraid of me, which actually makes your disconcertion more amusing than depressing.”

 

He squinted at her a bit. “It’s always disturbing when your accent almost but not-quite sounds a bit like All-Speak until I realize it’s actually because you’ve picked up a bit of my syntax and accent as it sounds to you from in my own memories.”

 

“Yeah. I can also speak perfect German in Erik’s accent. Scares the crap out of him every now and then, and I do so love keeping him on his toes.”

 

“So this is a revelation you’re making based on…”

 

“The perpetual train-wreck of self-doubt and want you’ve been caught up in.”

 

“… I have been chased before. Long ago. She’s Hel’s mother.”

 

“But you’re not married?”

 

“Not for a very long time, no, and never to her. She pursued both myself and my then-wife Sigyn at the same time, and successfully seduced us both despite how horrified Sigyn and I both were about potentially losing one another, given our own more troubled and chaotic relationship histories before we were wed, initially for resons more political than affectionate, but which we… came to appreciate another in more deeply over time.”

 

“Now can I get some of those memories next time?”

 

The trickster smiled wryly. “I think not. They’re solely mine.”

 

“I get that,” Rogue murmured. “Now you just have to work out away around Stark being in a perpetual state of confusion over what you want from him.”

 

The god shut his eyes again and groaned. “My life was so much easier before you people all started pestering me into behaving responsibly.”

 

“Yeah, but we’re all twisted, underhanded, and broken enough around here that you love us a little anyway,” she said softly.

 

His upper lip curled a bit and he tried to fling his arm over his eyes, but Rogue caught his forearm before he could get it halfway there and leaned down to kiss the top of his head where his hair protected him. “We love you too, Sugar.” She then turned on her heel and sauntered out as aloof as a cat, on footsteps almost as noiseless.

 

Of all the mutants in the mansion, that one never ceased to surprise him.

 

Then of course her foster-brother appeared in a loud puff of smoke. “Wait are you actually staying then?”

 

“… Where were you for that conversation?”

 

Kurt pointed overhead to the landing of the loft-area right above the den area Loki had collapsed in, possibly solely because the green leather couch there was secretly his favorite in the mansion.

 

The trickster god rubbed both hands over his face. “I’ll try to return, but they may not let me, and given Amora’s state, I have no real choice but to take that risk. I cannot foresee, however, any reason to stay there longer than necessary. I am… genuinely happier here.”

 

Being clung to by a strong blue-furred human in a tank-top remained a strange sensation, but about as strangely comforting as being trapped under a pile of kittens. Loki had managed to sit up enough to allow it, and wrapped an arm about the younger man’s shoulders too.

 

Then Kurt abruptly let go, looking a bit sheepish and rubbing a hand over the back of his neck as he straightened. “Uh, sorry. I just-”

 

“I’m glad you’ve enjoyed time with me, as well.”

 

“Yeah,” the young mortal nodded, his embarrassment fading. “I did.” He then did a deliberately clumsy parody of Rogue’s kiss to the top of his head, but sort of rubbed his chin against the god’s forehead in the process.

 

“I that genuinely felt a bit like being headbutted by a kitten.”

 

“I know. It’s an art.” He then put a hand over Loki’s head. “Lunch time, by the way.”

 

“Good.” He let himself be led out, still feeling both ridiculous and somehow… ridiculously lighter.

 

~~

 

Loki and Tony ignored the advice of leadership in the sleep department on some occasions that they both genuinely deemed a project too vital. Scott and Steve were annoyed, but Steve at least had learned to tell when Tony’s intransigence was just a bit too irremovable. Scott got the point after Loki applied duct-tape across the front of his visor the first time he tried to talk them out of it, and left it there until the Fearless Leader apologized and asked him to use magic to please get rid of the residue this time, which had caused Tony to crack up laughing hysterically.

 

 If the trickster perhaps added an extra kick to their coffee via magic to make functioning for days without sleep a little easier on them, and the inventor had perhaps worked it out, neither of them really talked about it. They had far, far too much other matter to discuss.

 

They were also still regularly dragged out of the laboratory environments for hours at a time, for meals, for strategy sessions, for Loki to continue Wanda’s lessons, to upgrade the Mansion’s systems to be able to process, decipher, and translate information and resources nicked from the Chitauri, and of course planning the rescue of Charles Xavier, which they would officially set out on within another three weeks’ time, once they had collected the resources and put into position the spies and sabotage traps they would require.

 

In their plans for what to do once they had Xavier back, Loki had made mention that Amora would recuperate far faster with aid from Asgard, suggesting that for her sake, at least, he might have to contact Asgard almost as soon as the dust cleared from his helping with the psychic expulsion of all Chitauri from Earth, especially given he was convinced that they would not be able to banish Thanos, and would all need to quickly attack him in the Chitauri’s absence, before he had any chance to rebuild new forces.

 

Wanda had also forced him to grudingly admit that he believed he wouldn’t come out of a direct battle with Thanos without needing Asgardian medical support in the end to survive what he might be willing to do, in order to make certain the despot stayed thoroughly dead, which all the others found rather disturbing. Tony had wished he found it more surprising, and hadn’t already been braced for it, a bit.

 

As far as Tony saw it, though, that meant he had only three more weeks to learn all of the vast amounts of information Loki had about the workings of the universe that no one else the inventor had ever met would be capable of teaching him quite the same way. Strange had tried, but the pair of them got along about as well as a couple of cats in a wet burlap sack, so there had been limits, whereas Loki…

 

The inventor and Loki got along like a house on fire, and it wasn’t _fair_.

 

Loki was witty, with a penchant for tricks and word-play, and dry humor that had successfully put Tony in stitches several times, only a couple of which had actually caused major problems for other people. In turn, the inventor had been striving to be even more brilliant than usual, even more scandalous, and had pulled a trick on Barton that had made Loki laugh so hard that tears ran down his face.

 

And in between all of that––the planning, meals with the teams, and the occasional pranks to keep them all sane––there was the fact Loki was, in fact, a mad genius. He managed to construct a pair of glasses that allowed Tony to see the strings that magic manipulated. He explained the interconnectedness of physical reality and the astral plane, and how the very existences of sentient beings affected the astral plane and thus put minor pressures on the physical plane.

 

“Self-preserving future history” was one of the sexiest phrases Tony had ever heard another person utter, and Loki could even explain time travel with three complex diagrams and a series of jokes in questionable taste, all while making clear all of the reasons time travel is a horrible idea 95.999% of the time.

 

Even if Loki hadn’t conveniently been tall with legs for days, and cheekbones that looked like they could cut glass, and long-fingered hands as clever as his words, and green eyes bright as poison, his brain alone would’ve been more than reason enough for Tony to desperately want to climb him like a tree and perhaps say something like, “I’m an atheist, but I really want you to convert me now, Silver-tongue, to a religion that requires us both to remove all of our clothing.” Because he had not even a single doubt in his mind that Loki would be more than capable.

 

It started to annoy Tony still more when Loki otherwise continued to be at least as much of a shameless flirt as Tony more usually would be (his brain seemed already set on ‘loyalty’ again despite all of his doubts, which was a bit worrying) but also it had long ago become clear that he seemed to particularly enjoy making the men in the house blush with some of his openly lascivious comments.

 

It was most likely out of the trickster’s natural inclination towards subverting expectations; the boys were less used to being flirted with in such a manner, and they thus made for him more interesting targets. It made perfectly twisted sense, for Loki.

 

 _No reason to be jealous over something illusory,_ Tony told himself, over and over again, at team meetings, and debriefings when shit went down requiring the intervention or one or more of their teams and emergency missions went out.

 

The one time Loki went slightly too far and accidentally got hit by Colossus so hard that the god found himself flung through a wall for coming onto the powerful Russian’s boyfriend a bit too warmly, Tony might have laughed far harder than the situation actually merited, especially as Loki bellowed that if he’d been even remotely serious, he would’ve at least invited Mr. Rasputin to join, too.

 

Because Loki still didn’t flirt quite as much, or as shamelessly, or _at all_ , with one Tony Stark, even in the lab. Especially when they were actually alone in the lab. The inventor had found himself flirting less out of habit just because it was too distressing being the only one making so many innuendos in a row without actually getting more than almost-politically polite dismissive witticisms in response.

 

So Tony was left, despite Pepper’s unexpected vote of confidence, to still suspect uncomfortably that he was the only one actually interested and that... stung.

 

And kept stinging, a little.

 

The first week, there had at least been some lingering touches and absurd lack of personal boundaries to leave him pleasantly confused, and intrigued, but once Wanda had gotten his post-apocalypse-prevention plans out of him over that first weekend, that had mysteriously gotten less and less frequent. And when it happened, Loki seemed to bring the moments to an end much quicker, almost nervously.

 

The fact that all of the Avengers and X-men, had caught on to whatever bizarre chemistry was between them and how very badly Tony wanted to get into the god’s pants, really didn't help. Most of them were probably even aware that he was too-deeply infatuated.

 

And in three weeks, he was increasingly convinced he wouldn’t get any chance to do anything at all like what Rogue seemed to be doing, which... what even _was_ she doing in Loki’s lap in the first place again?! Tony was having sudden trouble recalling.

 

~~

 

After dinner, before either of them could return to the lab levels, the junior X-men had demanded Loki rejoin them for Poker again, which had turned into a very tense game with everyone else at first trying to beat Loki, only to have their asses handed to them by Stark. The trickster and the inventor used a sort of divide-and-conquer tactic to keep the others from ever successfully taking either of them down. Every round came down mostly to the pair of them, with only a few exceptions. Tony managed to win one hand more than the trickster, by the end, but only barely.

 

Somehow from there, they had been dragged into a large media room, handed popcorn, and been settled in amongst all of the X-men and most of the other Avengers for a sort of movie night, with an awful lot of alcohol. This close to the inevitable end in a few weeks had people feeling nervous and in need of relaxation enough to embrace the indulgence in at least one night of peace and camaraderie.

 

And Rogue had somehow perched herself upon Loki’s lap and the pair of them were making increasingly scandalous and absurd commentary on the movie, which was actually an awful film, causing the others to crack up: except, notably, for Tony Stark, Logan, and Remy Lebeau.

 

Jubilee was sitting next to them, an arm slung across the trickster’s shoulders. She kept making references to various memes and mocking anyone who protested their MST3K treatment of the film. Tony suspected that whatever was going on, she was in on it. And something had to be going on. That had to be it. Loki looked far too amused, and like a cat who had successfully caught a canary while someone was ‘conveniently’ busy watching another cat trying to raid a fish tank, and Rogue was being even more sassy than her usual spitfire self, and she was _in his lap_ despite usually being notoriously averse to touch, for a lot of obvious reasons.

 

Tony had wanted to occupy that lap for weeks now. He felt completely justified in his feelings being hurt a bit ove this, and he was also now a bit annoyed.

 

Rogue still rested her head back on Loki’s shoulder and the side of his head, her hair shielding him from her deadly skin. The god didn’t seemed bothered by her at all, which made most of the other mutants in the room seem uncomfortable and perhaps a bit guilty they wouldn’t be nearly so relaxed, with skin still so close to Rogue’s.

 

It also made Logan look just a little bit homicidally annoyed too, Tony noticed, and Remy Lebeau appeared to be sulking and drinking quitely on the opposite side of the room, and in the process sinking slowly deeper into the armchair he’d claimed.

 

Eventually, Tony did put the other two men’s reactions together, with Rogue’s behavior, and make a connection, but he had a feeling there was still something he was missing. By the end of the movie, Rogue disentangled from Loki easily, and kissed the top of his head with a brief, “Thanks, Sugar,” before strolling casually from the room. The trickster smirked after her a little fondly, mostly because he appreciated her love of dramatic exits; toward Jubilee however, he only shook his head, and gently tugged the sleeve of her artfully-baggy yellow blouse (knowing she valued the cloth more than struggling) when she tried to make an escape of her own, and gently held her there until most of the others cleared out.

 

Remy, Tony noticed, was the first one to clear out, looking like he had spent the evening being emotionally flogged for something he felt he deserved, but still resented.

 

The others were a bit more confused, lingering only until they realized how Logan was glaring hard at Loki, and took that as a hint to perhaps get out quick. Tony stayed even when Dr. Grey tried to tug his sleeve. He only smiled at her, winked, and took another pull of his drink. Natasha, who had curled up opposite him on the couch and was using his lap as a place to rest her feet, also made no move to leave.

 

Loki noted their presence with mild amusement, before turning his gaze on Jubilee and smiling fiercely. “Would you mind explaining exactly what that was about?”

 

“They broke up, alright?” the young woman admitted. “She said it was something you mentioned that sort of set him off, but what it wound up coming down to is that he was too scared of what might happen, with her, to be what she really wants and needs in a relationship.”

 

Loki’s eyebrows raised so elegantly it seemed to be open defiance of the way that answer crudely, but effectively, lowered the tension in the room by several vital degrees. “Oh really?”

 

“Yeah, um. So maybe she was proving a point about lack of fear being possible, and necessary for her, and she picked you because she knows how much you aren’t afraid of her at all? And that you’d play along more easily and without question, okay? Also she had a feeling you’d get it, since you sort of accidentally set off the whole thing. She seemed to think you might’ve done it on purpose?”

 

Logan shook his head and a look of realization crossed his features that left Tony utterly baffled when he tried and failed to decipher anything beyond that from the man’s otherwise still-stony expression.

 

The trickster considered, looking amused. “I think what you mean to say is that of the available options least afraid of her capabilities, I’m the only available male she was aware would not let concern lead me to stop her from her plans, nor read too much into her actions concerning her own feelings toward me.”

 

“Well...” Jubilee cleared her throat.

 

“I think there was more than one point she was getting across, there,” Natasha suggested lightly.

 

“Consciously? No,” the younger woman disagreed quietly, glancing toward Logan. “Mostly, she really did just want to show Remy up and make him feel bad for clinging to their relationship despite being a bit cowardly when it comes to intimacy, okay?”

 

Loki hummed, and let her go. “And I’m glad. She deserves better quality cowardice, at the very least.” He shot a look toward Logan as well, whose eyes narrowed in an unamused manner.

 

Jubilee patted Loki’s arm and rose to her feet, strolling out of the room, not even pausing when she reached out to ruffle Logan’s hair on her way past him. The Wolverine’s grim expression remained unchanged.

 

The trickster held his stare steadily and raised both hands, palms-up. “You’re welcome, Mr. Howlett.” he said sweetly.

 

Logan scoffed and stalked out of the room quickly, after that.

 

“Careful, Loki, he’s touchy about the name thing,” Natasha chided lightly.

 

“Perhaps you might counsel him on being less full of angst over his own tragic past as a former brainwashed military weapon, his unnaturally long life-span and recuperative powers making people in his life temporary and fragile and prone to becoming targets for his enemies,” Loki shot back. “You certainly have the experience, do you not?”

 

Her expression went very cold, and she too left the room. “You could just say you’re planning to give in,” she called back towards him in Ukranian, mostly to keep Tony in the dark.

 

“I never said I was,” he replied in what sounded to Tony’s ears like English.

 

She laughed at him and the door to the movie-room snapped shut.

 

And then there were only two, and Loki was raising an eyebrow at him. “Yes?”

 

Tony made a decision right then that he needed to at least try something, _anything_ here, and pull out all the stops, or he’d probably regret it for the rest of his life.

 

He stood up calmly, closed the distance between them in a few long strides, and slid down onto Loki’s lap, his knees settling on either side of the god’s slim hips, and his hands gripping the back of the couch. Caught off-guard, the trickster inhaled sharply at the sudden proximity, but didn’t make any move to stop him, nor encourage him, his throat visibly constricting around a tight swallow.

 

Tony leaned in a little closer. “I really, really want you, you know.”

 

“I... had noticed you occasionally looking at me with apparent carnal interest.”

 

“You not interested?”

 

Loki’s tongue darted out long enough to sweep across his lower lip, and a faint flush appeared across his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. “Quite the opposite, Tony. I don’t trust myself with you at all.”

 

At that, the inventor tilted his head a bit to one side. “How’s that?”

 

“You...” the god started, then trailed off, his words seeming to fail him. Then he seized Tony’s face in both hands and pulled him down into a kiss.

 

 _Oh. OH. Oh sweet Tesla, he_ really wants _me_ , Tony managed to think, just before the capacity for words blissfully evaporated as Loki’s tongue continued to claim and explore the inside of his mouth and tease the inventor’s own too.

 

The trickster’s breathing had gone ragged quickly, and he gripped hard at the mortal’s hips, pulling them together until they couldn’t get any closer without the removal of some key articles of clothing. At the feel of Tony getting hard against him, Loki emitted a low, hungry sound like a growl and pulled back sharply, breathing hard. He tried to shut his eyes tightly, but one of the inventor’s fingers trailing down his cheekbone made his lids flutter.

 

“Don’t you dare hide this, Loki, please, let me see you.”

 

The plea was so raw, so sincere, that the trickster couldn’t disobey. Letting his eyes slowly open again, he stared into Tony’s lust-dark eyes and half-scared smile.

 

“Hey, so, uhm. When I say I want you, I don’t mean just the sex, and I find it a bit terrifying, because I’ve never felt that way about anyone biologically male, and you’re also sort of a brilliant millennia-old trickster god who doesn’t seem to have many plans to stick around down here on earth a moment longer than you have to.”

 

Loki swallowed tightly.

 

Tony pressed their foreheads together. “I’m not done with you, Loki.”

 

“I don’t know how long it would take me to be done with you,” the trickster murmured. “You never cease surprising me, astonishing me, and making me want to take you apart in every possible way that you might enjoy.” His fingers trailed down the mortal’s back as he spoke, enjoying the little shivers the caress earned for him.

 

“Really?” Tony started to grin, warm and elated.

 

The god kissed him again, slower and more tenderly. They melted into one another with more ease than either of them would’ve considered themselves capable of before then. When they did part for air, Loki whispered against the inventor’s lips, “I fear that even if I did find the strength to let you go, you might not want to let me, and I wouldn’t be able to fight you. You captivate me far too much for that. How could I possibly not destroy you?”

 

“We know each other two weeks and you’re that compromised?”

 

“Are you not?” the trickster asked, voice sounding slightly small.

 

“Loki,” he assured, with some amusement, “I want more than three weeks with you, and have for ages, but I sort of originally straddled your lap with the plans to try and seduce you and see what I could have for a while, since I might not get another chance. So yeah, I’d say I’m unusually compromised, but your brain is so gorgeous I really don’t think I can be blamed for a certain degree of desperation, given how much I want you to just... you know, you looking at me the way you are right now is way better than I thought I could have, just alone. You’re making my chest feel funny and I’m pretty sure it’s not a reactor malfunction, since Erik obligingly removed the shrapnel and there’s not even a magnet in there anymore.”

 

Loki smiled at him, affectionate yet wary. “I’ve wanted to bed you since we met, Tony, but I’ve come to want far more from you than that, since then. It has not made my life easier, and pursuing you now would throw so many of my established plans into complete disarray.”

 

“I swear I’ll be worth it,” Tony said. “You know I can be.”

 

The trickster’s hands slid under the hem of his shirt, then, memorizing the feel of the muscles of his back and shoulders. “I think I do.”

 

Tony kissed him, then, firm and hungry and pulling a low moan from the mad god’s throat as the inventor rolled his hips a little just _so_.

 

The door into the media room swung open hard enough to bounce loudly off its own spring-based door-stopper. “Kids live here. Get out of here before you ruin any of the furniture or traumatize any teenagers,” Logan snarled at both of them, then stalked off down the hall, leaving the door open.

 

The pair of mad geniuses parted, startled, and then both swore.

 

“ _By the Norns_ , do I miss the capability to teleport,” Loki growled.

 

“Maybe you can chase me,” Tony challenged.

 

The trickster shot him a look.

 

“I know where your room is, after all.” Seeing the god slowly arch one eyebrow, Tony pushed himself up to his feet again with visible reluctance. “If you catch me, you can have me any way you like,” he purred, and then took off running.

 

He wasn’t at all shocked to hear Loki immediately rise to his feet behind him, but he was a bit surprised to hear quadrupedal pursuit by the time he reached the stairwell. He ascended the stairs as fast as he could, with only the briefest look back, which allowed him just enough time to brace for the impact of a massive wolf sending him flying up the last bit of stairs to land on his back on the landing, with Loki pinning his wrists above his head as soon as he returned to his natural shape. Only magic could be responsible for Tony’s lack of head injury upon landing, as well, which the inventor was rather amused by.

 

“Good to know I’m involved with a gentleman, albeit one I’m hoping won’t be very gentle with me,” he remarked in response.

 

“Mmm, you did promise I could have you in any way I please,” the trickster purred. “And I am inclined to hear you scream my name.”

 

“You cheated, though.”

 

“You never stated there were rules for the breaking, so I don’t think so.”

 

“I thought they were implied.”

 

“Darling, I am a _trickster,_ ” Loki chided, then licked a stripe up one side of the inventor’s neck hotly, making him shiver. “And I also want to fuck you over every table in the labs, and every convenient surface, horizontal or otherwise, of our respective quarters, and eventually your homes as well, one by one, but for tonight, I would take you apart in bed alone, and see how many times I can make you come with a bit of magic aid, before you can take no more.”

 

Tony emitted a high-pitched noise that sounded a bit embarrassingly needy.

 

“You like that idea, Tony dear? You enjoy imagining yourself at my mercy as I bring you to the peak of pleasure again and again, long past the point of pain?”

 

“F-fuck, Loki, please, yes, that, do that, do me, and do all of that _to_ me,” Tony panted, challenging and hungry. “I like a little pain, and I want you to take me apart like your words do the universe.”

 

Loki emitted a faint moan, and dragged the inventor up off the floor with him, sweeping him unceremoniously into a bridal carry before taking him the rest of the way up the stairs.

 

“You’re carrying me.”

 

“I’m aware.”

 

“I have legs, you know.”

 

“Yes, I look forward to hooking your knees over my shoulders and folding you up against me, under me, in order to fuck you through the mattress,” Loki responded, in casual tones, as though discussing the weather.

 

Tony hissed as his jeans became acutely more uncomfortable again. “This carrying style does not get more comfortable with an erection, just letting you know.”

 

“Well,” Loki purred, dragging them both through the doorway into the room he had occupied within the Mansion since his arrival. “I shall have to make that up to you, then.” He dropped Tony on the bed, banished the inventor’s clothing with a snap of his fingers, pinned Tony’s hips down hard, and swallowed him whole in one motion.

 

Caught off-guard and unprepared for the sudden soft heat and wet and the swirling, slightly rough attentions of Loki’s clever tongue, Tony made a sound like a choked-off scream, fingers tangling in the god’s hair but not steering him: just clinging on for dear life as Loki’s mouth and throat worked him over so well he saw stars and knew he was writhing and making noises shamelessly as he was brought painfully close to the edge within just a few minutes.

 

He might have felt embarrassed, if not for how ridiculously good Loki was at this. _Silver-tongue_ crossed his mind and he might have been amused by it if he hadn’t been thoroughly distracted by lube-slick fingers stroking from the back of his balls, down along his perineum to swirl teasingly against his hole, making him whimper and try in vain to roll his hips down for more, but Loki only kept them pinned.

 

“Loki, your mouth, oh my sc... oh fuck, oh m- _my god_ ,” he gasped. It was actually the first time the phrase ‘my god’ had ever escaped his lips, but he genuinely couldn’t think of anything more apt. _Loki. Mine. Please, please, be mine_. “My _god,_ Loki f-fuck me, please, please-”

 

Loki answered with a rumbling hum of inquiry, green eyes falling open to look up, meeting the inventor’s desperate stare as he slipped a finger slowly into the mortal’s ass, watching Tony’s reactions intently.

 

The inventor felt the instinctive tightening of his own muscles against the intrusion and deliberately relaxed, pushing slightly back down against Loki’s finger as it slipped in deeper, biting his lip when he felt that finger curl up and push hard against his prostate, making him whimper, because even just that was almost enough to set him off, he was so close. “L-Loki, please, more, please, let me come.” He squirmed a little as a second finger pressed in alongside the first, letting out a hissing breath when they scissored apart, stretching him. It’d been a long time since he’d bottomed with a guy, since historically those experiences hadn’t been as good as when Tony had topped instead, but Loki was already so very exceptional.

 

Tony had known from the first time he’d heard Loki shout commands at a team of younger X-men, guiding them through Danger Room exercises, that being commanded around and controlled by the likes of this trickster had more appeal than Tony had ever thought would appeal to him at all, from the likes of _anyone_. Well, there had been the times Pepper had reprimanded him for certain varieties of misbehavior with handcuffs and a riding crop, but submitting to Pepper had always been a sort of part of their dynamic.

 

Loki was a former villain, and submission to him maybe shouldn’t have appealed, but oh, it did.

 

Perhaps Tony needed this cathartically, after losing Pepper, or maybe she had just taught him how much appeal submission could really have, and maybe Loki with his metal and leather armor and his princely manners and air of cold command in battle made Tony want to ask to be given orders, because he knew the way Loki would make them sound would get him hard in record time.

 

Tony was thoroughly distracted from such thoughts by a third finger and a faster rhythm with which those fingers were fucking into him, hard and twisting upward on every stroke in and out, making the inventor emit low cries of frustration and pleasure alike as he danced on the knife’s edge, his back trying to arch every time Loki’s ministrations struck that spot inside him, with such impeccable aim. There was definitely something to be said for how many centuries of experience Loki probably had, when it came to sex, and his impeccable way of being so infuriatingly precise.

 

Tony emitted a whine of loss when the trickster’s mouth retreated from his cock, but he was so close that the sudden absence was almost a relief, except for the fingers inside him moving faster, making muscles in his thighs flutter and tremble. “F-fuck, Loki, please, please, I’m gonna come, let me please!”

 

“You look more exquisite than any dreams could do justice, Tony,” the trickster panted, leaning over him and nipping at his lower lip. “You’re so eager for me, so wanton. I could do this for days.”

 

“P-please let me come sooner than that, Loki,” Tony groaned softly.

 

“You should see how stretched you are around my fingers, like this: red and and flushed. You’re quite tight, as well. Not many have taken you so, have they?”

 

The inventor shook his head. “N-no, only t-tried a f-few.”

 

“Not your preference?”

 

“Th-they weren’t great lays, fuck, nothing l-like this. Fuck, though, I knew you’d be good like this,” Tony rambled, losing track of his usual filters as a shudder rolled through him at the darker, hungrier and more possessive look those words brought to the trickster’s face. “Loki–– _ahh!_ Yes like that, fuck––my god, please make me come,” he hissed.

 

“I do like the sound of that exclamation, but I never thought you a devout man.”

 

“N-not s-something I usually say.” Tony managed to meet the god’s gaze again, holding it steady as he could manage even as his legs began to tremble a little and his cock ache. “I’m an atheist, see. Raised that way.”

 

Loki’s expression appeared a bit shocked, at that. “Y-you-”

 

“Loki, _my god_ , please make me come,” Tony pleaded.

 

The trickster’s breath caught and he wrapped his free hand around the inventor’s cock and stroked him, slow and dry and a little rough.

 

Tony was gone by the third stroke, coming so hard he saw white, come splashing across his own stomach. He continued whimpering as Loki’s fingers fucked him through it until he had no strength left to move, only faint breathless whimpers escaping him, though he still gave a louder noise of loss when Loki’s hands retreated, only to hiss at the sudden heat of them ghosting over the skin of his hips, then his stomach, stopping on either side of the reactor as he stared up at Loki in a mixture or discomfort, disbelief, and pure lust as the bit of magic erased his refractory period and Tony felt himself hard again, aching and too sensitive, but also more than ready for another round. “F-fuck, yes, I’m in love with magic and ‘s all your fault, fuck and now I’m in lust with it too. First you, now magic, Loki, how do you do this t-to me?”

 

The god kissed him hard, then, in response, hooking the inventor’s knees over his shoulders, just as he’d promised earlier that he would, his knees folded under him as he curled forward and pushed Tony under him, holding him in place firmly, the god’s erection resting between the cheeks of Tony’s ass like a promise.

 

Tony felt momentarily self-conscious, because the phrase ‘hung like a god’ was taking on new meaning for him suddenly. _That is going to_ destroy _me_ , he thought, and moaned at how the thought alone made his cock twitch, and a fresh trickle of pre-come escape him.

 

When the kiss broke, Loki murmured against his lips, “The same way you so ensnare me, Tony. You are a perfect mess, to me, of brilliance and bravado and self-deprecation, and you decipher the universe itself with your mind, like any mage, even without magic, and the way you see it all is beautiful to me like nothing else.” He reached between them, guiding himself to begin pressing into the inventor’s body, so slow it made sweat break out across his brow and temples, because the mortal was so hot, so tight and yet still pliant, and making such sounds under him. “T-Tony.”

 

“F-fuck you’re so––” Tony let his head fall back and rolled his hips down hard, just enough to get another inch, faster than either of them expected and making them both emit small cries, but the inventor’s was almost pained.

 

“Are you well, Tony?”

 

“Don’t you dare stop,” the inventor all but whined. “Please you hurt so good, the stretch just––fffffuck,” he managed not to tense up as Loki slid in the rest of the way to the hilt in a single unhesitant thrust. A whimper, definitely of pain, escaped the inventor’s throat, but when the god tried to pull back, Tony grabbed his hips and pulled him closer again, panting hard. “So good, so good, you’re so deep, didn’t even know anything c-could go that fucking deep, Loki, don’t stop.” He hissed further at another prickle of magic over his skin, and felt some of the burning ache fade instantly. “I was fine with that, don’t heal it yet please, I want to feel it.”

 

Loki emitted a helplessly aroused sound in response and rolled his hips to get just a bit deeper.

 

Tony’s hands snapped up to grip the god’s shoulder-blades, pulling against them at an angle to get better leverage to push himself back against Loki’s hips for more. “F-fuck me, Loki, I n-need more, please.”

 

“Use your nails, and mark me if you can, too, darling,” the god growled, and pulled his hips back slowly, feeling Tony’s fingers grip him tighter, short dull nails sinking into his skin hard. Then he thrust in again all at once, and immediately developed a rhythm of deep thrusts that caused those nails to scratch down his back sharply as Tony emitted a keen of pleasure in response, back arching as he cried out the god’s name repeatedly.

 

Tony was lost in it: the burn of stretch and the ache of each punishing thrust from how Loki’s cock almost bruised him from the inside, but it felt so good, and hit places in him so deep, the friction of every thrust both unending and yet too brief, for how much of Loki there was in him. Then the trickster grabbed Tony’s left hip, changing the angle just slightly, before thrusting back in faster, and harder.

 

A scream escaped Tony’s throat before he could even think to stop it, and he followed it hastily with panicked pleas for Loki to not stop, to never stop, to keep fucking him, because it was too good, the mixture of pleasure and pain bringing Tony back to the edge far too soon.

 

“You will feel me for days,” Loki rasped, sounding hopelessly lost himself. “I will heal you before any battles, my dear Tony, but at all other times I want you thinking of me, unable to forget this: how you beg so sweetly, while I fuck into you, and all of your pleas to be wrecked and ruined by my cock spreading you so far open.” He sounded a bit breathless. “By the nine, you are perfection to me. Come for me, my Tony, come from the ache I cause you.”

 

Tony tried to hold back, just to be contrary, but it hurt and so he whimpered. “T-tell me again, tell me to... p-please!”

 

“Now, Tony,” the god rasped, picking up his pace but with less control, close as he clearly was himself. “ _Come for me_ , now!”

 

With a tremulous cry, the inventor helplessly obeyed, and then cried out again as Loki kept fucking him, harder and more desperate, hissing endearments against his neck and then biting down hard where neck and shoulder met, making Tony’s back arch and an achingly sharp, shivering spasm to roll through him so suddenly that for a moment the inventor thought he might somehow manage to come again, especially when Loki moaned against his skin and came hard too, shaking with it.

 

Tony panted, hard at first, then a little slower, just held there, until Loki pressed deeper into him again and he realized just how hard the god still was. Another rush of heat and magic and the inventor was too, though he almost sobbed with the pain of it at first, until Loki began slowly fucking into him again, and he became lost in the rhythm of it. There was no haste, this time, just slowness, thoroughness, and wandering hands, as Tony dragged Loki down into a kiss again, their tongues dueling and occasionally mimicking the way the god fucked into Tony’s pliant, shaking body as his pleasure began to build up again.

 

There was only heat and sensation and _Loki_.

 

Then, inconveniently, there was knocking at the door.

 

The pair broke apart only enough to stop kissing for a moment and stare at it.

 

In the wake of the long silence, save for their heavy breathing, someone tried and failed to open the magically-locked-and-warded door.

 

“Loki, are you in there?” called Wanda lightly. “The Avengers are having trouble finding Tony, and requested that I find you to ask about that?”

 

The god smirked a little, and casually wrapped a hand around Tony’s cock and began fucking him again, slow as before but harder, very deliberately using every inch of penetration to apply friction across the inventor’s prostate.

 

Unprepared for the sudden return to enthusiastic friction as he was, Tony moaned helplessly and began again trying to grind his hips down for more, Loki’s name escaping his lips in tones of keening fervor, suddenly wanting––no _needing_ ––more and rougher again.

 

“Please advise the Avengers that he will rejoin them once I am done with him, but it may take several hours... perhaps even one or two days,” Loki called.

 

From the door Wanda could be heard saying, “Wow, right, okay, LEAVING.”

 

Tony managed to grit out, “Two days of this m-might actually kill me.”

 

“No, no, never that,” Loki purred in his ear suddenly, stroking him a little faster as he picked up the pace. “I take very good care of that which, and those who are, **_mine_** , my dear Tony.”

 

At that promise, the inventor came again, with a breathy moan, like it surprised him more than anyone, and then he whined high and long, almost sobbing against the god’s collarbone as another wave of recuperative magic almost instantly brought him back.

 

“Too much?” the god inquired lightly.

 

Tony considered, then unhooked his legs from Loki’s shoulders and, within the blink of an eye and using all of the tricks a certain assassin had forced him to learn for hand-to-hand combat, he flipped the god onto his back. He then sunk down hard on Loki’s cock with a rolling grind of his hips that made the god emit a shaky growl of shock and pleasure both.

 

“This answer your question?” Tony panted, grabbing hold of the god’s shoulders for leverage and beginning to rock in earnest, eyes wide and dark with desire as he took what he wanted, what he _needed_ , and Loki gripped his hips hard to help him get that much more and harder.

 

“Yes!” Loki panted, sitting up on one elbow and pulling the inventor down into a messy kiss, uncoordinated enough to occasionally click teeth, but they were both too desperate, too pleased, to care. Loki’s hand stroking him deliberately slow and not-enough, seemed to make Tony work just that much harder, with that much more utterly shameless enthusiasm. “Don’t s-stop.”

 

“Why would I? Still not done with you, might never be done, Loki, look at you,” Tony moaned, continuing to pick up the pace and try to get more, and deeper, as he rode the god, but the motions were unfamiliar––he hadn’t actually ridden any of his past partners like this––and he kept getting frustrated until Loki’s guiding hands finally pulled him down hard enough to force him to change angle or rhythm and suddenly the inventor would find himself almost seeing stars again, until Loki let him go again, hissing encouragement, until Tony really got the hang of fucking himself on Loki’s cock, and that, and how much Loki seemed to love the feel and sight of him, his encouragements growing steadily filthier and more possessive, sent Tony over the edge again, bringing Loki right along with him, moved both by the feel of the inventor’s body tightening around him, and the sight of Tony wrecked by his own orgasm, just from using Loki, and Loki’s teasing hands.

 

They both curled together to catch their breaths, then.

 

“Not instantly up for another round again?” Tony asked lightly.

 

“Mmm, do shut up and let me enjoy how close and plaint you feel like this, draped over me so,” Loki murmured, kissing along his jaw. “I will have you on your stomach with your hands bound before you in a few minutes, rest assured.

 

Tony leaned into him more heavily, as the god slipped out of him with a hiss, leaving him feeling wide open and used, his body struggling to close around the space Loki’s cock had so thoroughly occupied. The inventor could feel come trickling out of him, and became highly aware of just how much of it he could still feel in him. The thought made him flush hotly, possibly across his entire body. He might have emitted a small noise despite all attempts not to.

 

“Hmm?” the god inquired, not apparently bothering with actual words.

 

“Oh, you know. Just feeling stretched wide open and highly aware of how much of your come is in me, and finding it indecent and a little embarrassing, but also ridiculously hot,” Tony muttered.

 

Loki hummed and kissed him again, briefly. “Good.”

 

~~

 

The next morning, Tony awoke feeling more comfortable that he’d felt sleeping under anything heavier than a sheet, ever since he’d returned from Afghanistan with his unconventional torso-piercing. The arc reactor caused him to run a bit hotter in his sleep than before Afghanistan, that was all, but this time he wasn’t overheated even a little, and in fact felt pleasantly cool, soothed to his very bones.

 

Of course, the fact he was little spoon with a frost giant acting as his big spoon, was probably a major factor, there. Tony sighed contently and basked in the sweet cooler temperature like a cat might a warm sunbeam. He managed to enjoy it for a while until a sharp series of knocks on Loki’s door caused both he and the trickster to tense slightly and stiffen in non-fun ways.

 

“Come down for breakfast or we’re sending Colossus in to drag you both out,” Pietro called. “But shower first, because Wolverine is claiming he can smell you both from the far end of the hallway at this point.”

 

Tony sniggered helplessly, gripping Loki’s arms when he felt the trickster starting to hesitantly loosen his hold.

 

“My apologies, but you must be cold,” the god said, sounding hesitant.

 

_Oh._

 

Tony rolled over, not letting Loki let him go in the process, keeping those arms about his waist. He deliberately pressed the reactor against Loki’s chest. “You’re actually ridiculously comfortable. The reactor messes with my sleep-homeostasis not enough to be a health hazard, but enough to usually be a bit uncomfortable sleeping under anything more than a sheet.” He wrapped his arms around Loki’s neck and buried his face against the god’s throat. “You’re perfect. Seriously.”

 

“I...” Loki apparently had no words, and settled for squeezing him a little tighter.

 

Another loud knock on the door. “They mean it!” Wanda added, on her way past.

 

Tony muttered petulantly, making the god chuckle at him.

 

“We should eat,” Loki said lightly. “You will need your strength. I still plan to have you over a few lab tables today.”

 

“... Alright, you’ve persuaded me.”

 

~~

 

Loki kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

 

There was always a catch. Always. Nothing good lasted. Not in the hands of someone like himself, in any case. It was either stolen, or it it betrayed, or it was destroyed, or fate pulled them far away from him to a place like Nifelheim, where he could only seldom visit.

 

Tony Stark was too brilliant, too brash, too mad, too beautifully perverse, too gloriously irreverent, too genius, too beautiful, too wonderful, and too in love with Loki to be human, to be _anything real_.

 

Selfishly, Loki clung to him anyway.

 

Of course, he didn’t admit it aloud where Tony could hear, because he was sane and self-aware enough to know it would only start an argument at best, and be something which might drive the inventor away from him at worst. Being a talented liar as he was, selective omission had always been one of his best tricks.

 

The problem, it turned out, was that Tony Stark wasn’t the only person he had been playing this game with, in his head, of waiting for the other shoe to drop, while simultaneously letting them far too close, because they were too shiny, and too genuinely interested in him and interesting themselves, for Loki to be able to find the strength to push them away as all of his instincts and prior history screamed at him that he should do, in order to keep himself truly safe, to keep himself from being hurt by them, but then…

 

Well. Loki had always had a habit of enduring pain for those he cared about; in the past, those occasions had been the only times he had felt almost, almost worthy of them––when he could take pain from them, or for them so that they might be spared it. It had been so with his children, with Thor, and even all of Asgard.

 

He hadn’t truly suffered like that yet for those in Midgard who considered him an ally, or a friend in the cases of Wanda and Pietro, or a lover in the case of Tony Stark, but he couldn’t help but believe that it was only a matter of time; however, he also did not believe himself truly worthy of any of their regard, and so that same part of him was already half-convinced that he would probably die if put into a position to prove himself, or worse––he would ruthlessly survive and be the only one left standing and in one piece, only to be shattered by that alone from within shortly after.

 

The time would come for Loki to make a sacrifice, and he would fail as he always did, and suffer the loss of that which was precious to him as punishment, and lose more shreds of his sanity and self-worth all over again... Unless Loki could extricate himself from those he valued first, and spare them his own inexorably approaching downfall, whatever form it might take. That had been the plan.

 

Then of course Rogue saw straight through him with a touch and called him on his game, and executed what even the trickster had to admit had been a fiendishly clever plan to make her ex-boyfriend miserable, Logan uncomfortably self-reflective, and Tony Stark just jealous enough to throw caution to the wind and himself into Loki’s lap. That still left the problem of another two mortals he considered himself close to, these days.

 

Pietro was able to accept change with more ease and relief, willing to wait and watch and catch people off-guard with his quiet observations at a later time. Quite unlike Wanda, who would hound the truth out of Loki Lie-smith with a persistence that reminded him so much of his daughter that he genuinely became steadily more powerless the more tenaciously persistent she became, and how well she learned his quirks and how to expliot them to force him into unaccustomed sincerity. Except when it came to asking him to stay, which she seemed to perpetually fear would send him spontaneously fleeing out of their lives.

 

She wouldn’t have that caution holding her back and Loki knew it, and had been dancing around it for weeks, same as he had been dancing around Tony Stark for similar reasons.

 

~~

 

Of course, the problem with having kept this up for weeks already with the other humans in the mansion, was that some of them had already picked up on what he was doing, and were all clearly ready for him to get over himself. Dr. McCoy had seen it the first time he had seen Wanda learning magic from the trickster, and so had Rogue.

 

Then later, Rogue had realized he was doing the same thing with her. She then told Logan, who confirmed he’d figured it out too. So when Wanda Maximoff had accidentally interrupted their sex the previous night, she had of course proceeded to speak first to Natasha for her advice, and to Dr. McCoy, who sent her to Rogue who happily spilled the various secrets she’d been holding over Loki’s head for a chance to make his life that much more difficult. (It was, strangely, how she and the trickster showed one another affection and professional respect.) and finally to Dr. Banner primarily because he knew more about Stark’s side of the matter.

 

Everyone suspected that Emma was aware already, and knew what they were up to, but if so she didn’t say a word, nor did she interfere; although everyone was also pretty sure she was entertained by the whole show, or would have meddled sooner.

 

When the trickster and Tony Stark sat down together at the breakfast table, Wanda shot the god of mischief a look that said very seriously, _We need to talk_. The rest of breakfast passed otherwise normally, except for Clint trying to make fun of Tony a bit for sleeping with Loki, but it backfired and eventually the archer dramatically fell out of his chair lamenting loudly about the pains in his mind’s eye Loki and the mad inventor had proceeded to burden him with.

 

Of course, Loki then proceeded to hide from Wanda.

 

He was a mage and a warrior of Asgard, but he was also clever enough to know when he was sufficiently outgunned that a strategic retreat in order to prepare himself to face deeply emotional topics. Which is to say he felt sudden acute terror and decided to hide until he could get past that, because Wanda would know precisly how to exploit that terror. Mostly, he suspected, because she might these days have an even keener awareness of why he felt it than he himself did, given all the insecurities he tried not to dwell on these days, and how much less inclined to ignore them Wanda was. That realization unsettled him even further. Clearly, this meant that he needed time to think first. And so, he fled abruptly and couldn’t be found.

 

Logan refused to track him. “Because it’s a bit too ridiculous. You’re better off waiting him out until he’s got his performance-face back on.”

 

Wanda then proceeded to sulk at him, until after a few minutes made it clear he was as immune to her sulking as he was anyone else’s, being a professional at it himself. So she left.

 

~~

 

This meant that the trickster also was hidden from Tony, who was a bit annoyed when this persisted until after lunch too: the trickster appearing briefly to snog him senseless before dragging him down to lunch, only to vanish again once the meal was over.

 

After another couple of hours, Tony was getting genuinely angry.

 

“Wanda wanted to talk to him,” Rogue said, over his shoulder, making the inventor spin around to stare at her. “Don’t worry, he’ll be back, once either she hunts him down, or he surrenders.” She offered him a cold bottle of Canadian beer, despite being, Tony was mostly-certain, under the age of twenty-one herself, if only barely. Then again, she was also drinking one of her own.

 

Tony took it, and let her lead him out into the Mansion gardens, to sit on the open on a bench where it was obvious to any people interested in either of them that they were just shooting the shit, not flirting or trying to get away with anything.

 

Rogue complained about the necessity of that briefly.

 

“Well, you did sort of...”

 

“Oh, I know,” she said, smirking a little. “Remy was already over it by this morning, but I think our break-up is actually final this time. I’m not entertaining much more false hope, and I think he’s given up pursuit, now I’ve made my point about quite what I need from a lover.”

 

“Uhm...”

 

“You’re thinking about logistics, aren’t you?”

 

“A bit? Sorry?”

 

“Silk scarves are a good start.”

 

Tony nodded thoughtfully.

 

“You know Loki is incapable of believing he deserves good things, right?” she asked lightly.

 

The inventor fixed his stare on her sharply. “Uhm. No?”

 

“You seen him teaching Wanda?”

 

“A few times, yeah.” He thought about it a bit, and Loki’s speech the day they’d first met, about his plans to leave. The implications of Rogue’s words sunk in. “ _Oh_.”

 

She half-smiled at him a bit bitterly. “I’m used to being in love with similarly hopeless angst cases, given most people I’ve dated or had major crushes on all live here, which is more awkward than you can possibly imagine, let me tell you.”

 

Tony half-smiled a bit and took a sip of his beer. It wasn’t bad. “You’re telling me this why, exactly?”

 

“Because I like him. He’s done right by all of my friends, and he still thinks he has to leave for us to be happy, and if anyone can work out how to get it through his thick skull that he’s allowed to still be friends with us even once the Chitauri are gone, I’m hoping it’s you, genius,” she declared calmly, her smile sweet as honeysuckle, despite her lips being more deadly than belladonna.

 

“Have you seen my track record?” the inventor deadpanned.

 

“Have _you_ really seen _his_?” Rogue asked.

 

Tony thought about some of the things they’d talked about in the wee hours of the morning in the labs. So maybe Loki had gotten the inventor to talk a bit more about Yinsen and the Ten Rings. Maybe in return, Tony had gotten Loki drunk enough to talk about Thor’s failed coronation, and finding out his true nature when Thor dragged Loki and the Warriors Three to Jotunnheim, Thor’s banishment, Loki’s lies to him and attempt to assassinate him and the Warriors Three with the Destroyer, and his attempt to wipe out all of Jotunnheim and how it led to the destruction of the bïfrost. Tony had told him all about Howard, and Obie, and Obie’s betrayal, and Loki had told him about what little he remembered from time enslaved by the Chitauri.

 

Really, in retrospect, he should’ve worked out by the end of the first week, when Loki didn’t kill him for knowing all of those secrets, that the trickster might be fond of him about as much as Tony was fond of the trickster.

 

“I... have.”

 

“Really?” the young woman’s eyebrows raised, as she tucked a lock of her long white bangs back behind her ear.

 

“We got very drunk after the first major battle we joined you guys on, the one where he almost got his arm cut off,” Tony said simply. “ _Very_ drunk. We wound up talking quite a lot.”

 

“So he told you about the Odin thing, and Thor, and the rest?”

 

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Does he usually tell those?”

 

“Nah,” Rogue said. “He just grabbed my arm to pull me back from a nasty fall of a high ledge on his third mission with me. I’d borrowed powers from Juggernaut at the time, so I’d been plowing through a lotta things brute force style, kinda like ya Hulk.”

 

She smiled a little at his arch look in response. “Well, my uniform sleeves were ripped up, so he caught skin. That’s about the only reason he discussed stuff like that with me, since I got a dose of it. He felt bad, that I did, and insisted on helping me get rid of some of them. He’s not psychic, but he knows what he’s doin’ on the astral plane, and in dreams.” She shot him a serious look. “It means a lot to me, for him to not be afraid of me.”

 

Tony remembered how comfortable she’d been, draped over him, resting her head against the side of his, protected by his hair, and her own, between them. Rogue was many things but “relaxed” rarely made it into the top ten adjectives anyone would use to describe her, since the nature of her mutation meant she had to adopt a sort of Constant Vigilance approach to interaction with other humans.

 

“Well…” Tony started, “the way he put it, about most of his allies here, before we even...” He gestured vaguely. “The first day I was here, I told him you’d all miss him, since he’d accidentally made it clear his long-term plans still eventually included leaving earth, and he pointed out to me that the mortal life-spans you all have mean that if he gets attached to any of you, or all of you, he’s basically guaranteeing himself an awful lot of grief over the next century or so.”

 

“And you?”

 

“I don’t know. I’ve only been aware he’s infatuated with me about he same as I am with him for less than twenty-four hours so far. Basically, I’m trying not to panic.”

 

Rogue chuckled at him. “God, you’re as ridiculous as him, why am I not shocked? Oh, right, you’re both narcissists, a little...”

 

Tony shrugged.

 

“Look, it’s clear to me at least that you’ve got the same mindset he does right now,” she said. “You’re waiting for the good to be taken away by chaos, but you’re so worried about that you seem to’ve forgotten you’re Tony _goddamn_ Stark, and if anyone’s capable of making the impossible possible, it’s you.” She leaned toward him and said, in challenging and almost mocking tones, as Natasha had advised her, “ _So what are you gonna do about it?_ ”

 

Something went off, bright and inspired and _suddenly driven_ in Tony’s stare. “Good question,” he murmured, finishing off his beer in a few swallows. Then he grinned fearsomely. “I’ll get back to you.”

 

Her answering grin was sweet as honey, though it made her teeth look sharper than the bite of strong bourbon.

 

~~

 

Hank McCoy found a trickster god hiding under a lab table in the medical wing.

 

He wished he could say that he was surprised.

 

“I was hoping you had slightly more dignity.”

 

“So was I,” Loki assured. “Then I recalled that, being who and what I am, I can’t get much worse for my own reputation than that ridiculous _and patently untrue_ story about the horse, and decided to save what scant dignity I have left for another day.”

 

Sitting down on the floor beside the table, Hank met his eye.

 

The trickster looked irritable, and hunted, and conflicted.

 

“I want to tell you something, but only after I remind you that I have been a teacher here, as well as their primary medico, for years, and known many, many adolescent humans at their most immature: you are angsting under a table like a teenager and should probably stop that, given you’re an ancient god.”

 

Loki glared at him, and didn’t say a word, but he did get out from under the desk and stalk out of the lab.

 

Dr. McCoy had no doubt he would finally have words with Miss Maximoff.

 

~~

 

Wanda had her arms crossed over her chest and looked deeply, deeply annoyed with him, by the time Loki found her.

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“You’ve been just hiding, Loki. Like I’m going scold you or something. What the actual fuck made you think that was a good idea?” she snapped.

 

“I needed to get my thoughts together,” he said quietly, almost sheepishly. When she was actually angry, Wanda managed to successfully employ a tone of abject disapproval that he had only ever before heard from the likes of Frigga, and it was frightfully effective: all authority, disappointment, affection, and guilt-inducement.

 

She huffed. “You didn’t even know what I want to talk to you about.”

 

“Yes, that’s part of why it took me so long. There were many eventualities I felt a need to review.”

 

“You’re an idiot, sometimes,” she sighed. “I want to ask you to stay, dammit.”

 

Loki blinked at her uncomprehending. “Pardon?”

 

“I don’t care if you leave this mansion. I don’t even care if you leave Earth; although that would be really inconvenient probably, I would think. I don’t––but only as long as you’ll actually still stay around, as my friend, Loki. And not just mine. I want your word you’ll come back,” her voice trembled slightly, but she didn’t let it even slow her.

 

The trickster felt an unfamiliar mixture of warmth and shattering somewhere behind his sternum. “I’ll outlive you.”

 

“Yes, and I’m kind of sorry about that, but I selfishly like you enough that I sort of can’t bring myself to care, because I also know you’re sort of almost happy with us, a lot, and you’re so different from how you were when Pietro and I first found you.”

 

“Wanda, I-”

 

“No, you listen.” She stepped closer and jabbed at his chest with her black-painted index fingernail. “ _You_ still seem to think you’re craven and a villain, and while admittedly you’re selfish and ruthless and have a degree of bloodlust in battle that even Logan thinks is occasionally a bit overzealous, and none of us expect you to stick around for the sake of playing hero like a member of the X-men, you still need to get it through your thick skull that I’m far from the only one who would be happier, knowing maybe you’d stick around!”

 

Loki was staring at her with an almost stricken expression.

 

“Because you’re selfish enough to covet us, as your friends, too.” Wanda tried not to lose her nerve. She really did. “Look, Loki, I can take care of myself fine, but I’m a lot saner, with friends around, other than my brother, essential though he is to my sanity too,” she said, her voice wavering a little.

 

When he touched her shoulder, she leaned into the touch and met his stare again. It took her a few moments to find the rest of her voice, but he waited, seeing that she clearly had more to say.

 

“I just––I wish you’d let me care the same for you that you care about me, without holding back like you keep doing. I’m not going to fucking betray you like the people you used to know.” She shook her head and smiled at him shakily. “I’m young, and I’m a bit ridiculous, and I’m a mutant and a witch, and if I want to be friends with you, little god, you should _damned well_ let me, okay? Stop brushing me off when you’re hurt, if you’re going to keep hugging me as well as you do when _I’m_ hurt!” She stopped when Loki pulled her closer a step and wrapped his arms around her tightly with a sound like he could barely breathe anymore.

 

She clung hard enough to hurt a human, but Loki only rested his forehead on her shoulder and shuddered, trying to keep himself contained.

 

“Will you stay?” she asked.

 

“I think that I wish to. I... will have to leave earth to inform Asgard that I am alive, and seek aid healing Amora, but I would return here, if I can. I want to,” he admitted, barely audible. “You’ll be the death of me, all of you.”

 

She kissed his hair lightly, right above his ear. “You like us too much to care, and you know it, because we make you laugh, and we all want to learn from you, and we think your tricks are fantastic, and you’ve saved our lives.”

 

“I... it’s reflexive, in battle. I spent so long fighting alongside-”

 

“Loki.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“We don’t care why or _how_ you happened to save our lives. We care that you keep doing it, and you have done. Yeah, it’s been in pursuit of a common enemy, but you know it’d be a lie if you tried to tell yourself you didn’t get attached to us.”

 

“True,” the god admitted softly.

 

She tucked her chin over his shoulder. “We found you when you were low, we’ve seen you weak and almost powerless, and we’ve seen you stronger too, and we know who and what you are better, I think, than most of the people who used to know you, based on some of the stories you’ve told the younger ones here. All of humanity is about to have a reason to thank the X-men and all of their allies, from the Avengers and the Brotherhood, to you, if we can make Cerebro work agains the Chitauri. Not a single one of us here gives a damn what Asgard thinks, because we know you and we like you.” She smiled a little. “Especially Stark.”

 

Loki huffed. “I was waiting for that to come up. I know he’s-”

 

“-been infatuated with you practically since day one?”

 

The trickster said nothing to that. It was possible he wasn’t breathing.

 

“Congrats. He seems like he can even keep up with you.” Wanda patted his back firmly. “You should try and keep him.”

 

“This was not how I imagined this conversation would go,” Loki said leadenly.

 

“You got picked up by a bunch of desperate humans trying to fight off an apocalypse that happened to consist of a bunch of Chitauri that you really, really wanted to murder to death in painful ways for your own reasons,” she said.

 

“But I-”

 

“Look, I’m not saying anyone here is under some delusion that you’re redeemed for the things you’ve done anymore than the rest of us killers, but the Earth has a lot to rebuild, you have a lot of power and resources, and Tony Stark does too.”

 

“My past crimes-”

 

“He’s also got a lot of blood on his hands, but he’s also an engineer. he’s going to be helping us, and the rest of the world, rebuild into something entirely new,” Wanda murmured. “You really want to miss out on that?”

 

“Not for a hundred years on the throne of Asgard,” Loki murmured, eyes falling shut. “But I...” He cleared his throat. “I would need more than a mortal lifetime to be finished with him, I suspect.”

 

Wanda pulled back enough to smile up at him when he lifted his head. “You saying you have an idea or two how?”

 

The trickster looked away quickly.

 

“Yeah, you do.”

 

“It’s technically an interplanetary war-crime.”

 

She patted his cheek. “That’s pretty fitting, actually, for a courting gift from the God of Chaos to the former Merchant of Death. Let me know if I can help.”

 

“Humanity is made up entirely of insane people, isn’t it?” Loki asked, still deeply perturbed by this entire conversation.

 

“Oh yes. Is it any wonder you like us?”

 

At that, the god couldn’t help but laugh hysterically, because, however frightfully, she was all too correct. Then he sobered. “It is not… my own memory of my past crimes which I speak of, however. It’s Asgard’s.”

 

She realized slowly what he meant. “You think they might imprison you?”

 

“I am not discounting the possibility that thier first actions might include shackling me first and asking questions later,” Loki murmured.

 

“How would we get you back.”

 

The trickster took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “You, actually, might be my only chance, there. And Amora’s. If you’re willing.”

 

“What do you need me to do?”

 

Loki cast a quick, simple spell to shield them both from being overheard or scanned telepathically. “It would require you to trick Cthon into aiding me.”

 

She took a deep breath in, then slowly let it out. “Why trick?”

 

“Because there’s not many other ways to persuade a terrestrial god to send a message to Helheim.”

 

“To your daughter?”

 

Loki nodded. “And my son, Fenrir, whom it would be geniunely impossible to persuade Chthon to approach. Fenrir would eat him.” He sounded dotingly proud.

 

“Have you told Stark about the arrest threat?”

 

The god hesitated.

 

“You realize he’ll hunt you down, right?”

 

“There isn’t a way-”

 

“Honey, he’d make one, and you know it,” she chided him.

 

The trickster couldn’t argue that. “It… came up in an early conversation in our acquaintance. We were rather drunk, however, but I believe he recalls. He will doubtlessly interrogate me about the further details soon enough.”

 

Wanda smirked a bit at that. “Good. Now tell me your plans, and I’ll tell you if they actually suck.”

 

He chuckled, and proceeded to explain.

 

~~

 

Tony managed to find Loki not long after he tracked down Wanda, who appeared far less pissed off than before, pestering her brother affectionately while they played chess. Loki stood near them, only occasionally adding an additional barb in favor of one bickerer or the other based on whim.

 

Tony promptly pounced on the god of mischief, with intent to drag him to the floor, but he made a key miscalculation, and wound up with his arms around the trickster’s shoulders from behind, and the back of Loki’s head against his collarbone, and somehow no leverage to speak of, with his feet now no longer touching the floor. He might as well have tried to tackle a marble statue.

 

“Okay, I know you’re technically denser than most humans, insofar as your tissues and that’s part of your absurd strength in relation to your size, but I’m now doing the math in my head and trying to figure out how I didn’t wind up, uh... damaged. Because seriously, how much do you weigh, that I can’t affect your center of gravity pretty much at all, like this?”

 

Loki chuckled. “I am a shape-shifter and a mage. I can take particular measures to ensure I do not harm my chosen lover for an evening, by consciously limiting my strength, and using a spell or two to simulate less weight and mass.”

 

“Much appreciated.”

 

“How else would I have more opportunities to debauch you further?”

 

Before Tony could respond, Scott Summers appeared in the hall.

 

“There you both are. We finally heard back from Dr. Strange, and he’s got updates about the compound’s defenses, c’mon.”

 

Loki turned to glare at him. Tony, since he still clung in place on the god’s back, also glared, because he could, and thought Summers deserved it too.

 

The X-men’s Fearless Leader raised his eyebrows. “What are you two even doing? No, don’t answer that. I probably don’t want to know. Just come on, meeting time. Loki, you need to meet Strange anyway.”

 

“Oh shit, you haven’t met him, yet?” Tony exclaimed. “High ho Silver-tongue, away!” He pointed straight ahead down the hall.

 

Loki didn’t move, but did slowly turn his head to shoot the inventor an incredulous look. “What on earth are you referencing this time?”

 

“Uhm.” Tony, recalling a particular story about a horse that every single one of the X-men had assured him was untrue and warned him to never mention anywhere in Loki’s presence, promptly decided not to go into that. “Just an old Television show. To the meeting, shall we?”

 

“Are you really planning to cling like this the whole way?”

 

“Maybe.” Tony made a slightly startled noise at the feel of a disembodied force moving his legs without his permission, but relaxed when the end result was both legs lifting on either side of Loki so that the god could get a hand under the back of each of his knees, arms providing additional support. “Oh. Wow.”

 

Scott bit his lip and turned on his heel, marching off quickly.

 

“What is wrong with him?” Loki asked.

 

“We look a bit ridiculous,” Tony said. “I might be reconsider-AAAAHH!” He wasn’t actually sure quite how Loki pulled him up and over the trickster’s own head and somehow tossed him up in the air for a moment, managing to rearrange him there so that in the end, Tony was being carried bridal-style again.

 

“Is this better?”

 

“Uh... I can walk.”

 

“If you’re certain.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Loki then unceremoniously dropped him.

 

Tony swore at him, but the trickster only giggled helplessly and helped him up, before joining the others in their meeting.


End file.
